At this distance you're a mirage, a glossy image fixed in the posture of the last time I saw you

1. Either I've been hormonal all week, or this is homesickness. One time I stayed in bed all day, playing Elliott Smith albums, with "Pretty (Ugly Before)" and "Independence Day" on loop. Another day I sang all the pieces I could remember from the musical Once on This Island. When those ran out, I sang songs I knew from South Pacific, My Fair Lady and West Side Story, and thought of stormy days when Ate Nessa and I would sing in our old shared room with our feet up and a cockroach running around, both of us too chicken or lazy to kill it. As if singing and conscious ignorance could solve anything.

2. Friday the 13th was the best, a day of relief. I didn't have to worry about performing in class and feeling self-consciously non-white for 4 whole days. I spent it doing 2 loads of laundry, grocery shopping, ironing clothes, and reading the 3 (THREE!) postcards that arrived in the mailbox, from Marie, Kit, and Kuya Zivan (THANK YOU!). 3 lovely, well-written postcards. I love holding mail in my hands.

3. My hands are getting older, drying up in this weather. I've decided not to put on nail polish anymore -- too much effort, and there's no one to notice anyway. The temperature has plummetted to around 7 degrees Celsius, and I'm wearing black knit gloves. There's a 2-week-old scar on my knuckle where I scraped it against the doorframe, in a hurry to get in.

4. My housemates are great. It's a pretty international house, with 2 Filipinas, 1 Iranian, 1 Jewish American, 1 German Buddhist, 1 French girl, and 1 Canadian. But while I'm thankful that I have drinking buddies and freshly baked bread and company during attacks of loneliness, I'm also starting to get drained being surrounded by people 24/7. (Even in Manila, the only way I could maintain equilibrium was to go out with friends one day, and to retreat into hermit mode the next.) I smell their cooking, jostle for fridge space, share a bathroom with 3 girls, hear them through the thin wall separating my bedroom from the kitchen, which is the house's only common area. In my dreams I hear doors closing, floorboards creaking, the microwave beeping, footsteps on the stairs, someone snoring, someone else murmuring, and murmuring.

5. My bedroom is dark in the daytime, my window facing the neighbor's brick wall. Light seeps into the room for only 10 minutes a day, at high noon. I miss having private sunlight.

6. There are tables I love on the 13th floor of the library. In each of the apexes where one book stack meets another, there are reading corners with huge windows overlooking the city, with Lake Ontario visible on clear days. Sunlight floods through these windows in the afternoon. (Am I so sun-starved?)

7. The good thing about the 12-hour difference between Toronto and Manila is that there are always people online at night when I'm saddest. My TDP friends have been a great source of comfort, sending me pictures of my puke (which looks strangely like North America) and videos of stolen kisses and drinking "tributes." While I don't miss the hours, or the work I did for 5 months, I do miss the company of down-to-earth friends (none of this arrogant academic bullshit) and all the time I had to read the books I wanted after work.

8. To be honest, I don't feel like I'm learning enough. Except for one class (the "Ethics, Authorship and the Right to Privacy" class on Lillian Hellman and Tennessee Williams) where I'm actually eager to read a book and 2 secondary essays a week, I think I'm just going through the motions. The required Bibliography course is pretty tedious, and it's not even a credited/graded class. The 1930s poetry class is a bit of a bore, and I know I could just read up on the era and the poets on my own if I wanted to. And because of all the work (plus the student papers I'm marking for my teaching assistantship -- and surprise, surprise, some papers are just as atrocious as the ones I used to get in Ateneo), I haven't had time to write anything new for my CW class, anything good, anything complete. It's starting to get frustrating.

9. An old essay (from November 2005) on my favorite Auster novel was published in the Philippine Star last Sunday. Strangely enough, I already feel so far removed from the self who wrote this.

10. A former student sent me a message on Friendster last week. He was part of my first batch of students, from the class that sang for me and gave me a birthday cake. He's a senior now, and afraid of being jobless next year. But he thanked me, and said I was part of the reason he did well in college, after the D I gave him for a proposal paper that made him strive to do better. I wish I could tell him: I was fumbling around too, and I still am. Now that I'm a student again, I remember how uncomfortable I felt in front of the classroom, like I was an impostor of sorts. This also makes me worry: what am I going to do after this MA? I don't want to return to the classroom and get burned out again.

11. Despite the bad stuff I've heard about her as a person, I still love Atwood. I still feel her poems speaking to me. Here's Postcard.

12. Where are you? It's you I want to hear from the most.