Nevergirl’s

I’m not sure why I get invited to speak on the subject of How to Write Better (yes, all caps; and yes, it’s intentional; I know how to capitalize, you dolts!) Sure, I had a weekend column in Sunstar Cebu when I was 19 and a bi-monthly column for The TicTac (a General Santos City-based community paper) when I was 17, but that was only because Sunstar editor Noel Villaflor and GenSan-based brainiac Elmina Rayah Dizon found me cute (in the same way that bacteria is cute under controlled environments). The truth is, anyone who pays me to write is bound to get gypped. I do not write better than anyone. I do not write better, period. As a matter of fact, I do not believe people should write better because writing better than an aunt, seatmate, or cat

1. turns people into drama queens.
2. makes people really arrogant.
3. increases the odds that I would come across writing so difficult to read I grow tumors going from one paragraph to the next.

You see, writing isn’t a skill or a talent. It’s an affliction. It’s an affliction because it usually comes with a colorful imagination, a tendency to over-dramatize, the urge to get up in the middle of the night (or just before the rooster does, or in the middle of sex) to write something down, and the amazing ability to get very highly paid, very poorly paid, or not paid at all for work done (and yes, you would be better off gunning for health care jobs because no, staring off into space with a glazed look in one’s eyes is not considered compensationable labor).

Parents, if you love your children at all, do not encourage them to write. Set them straight as soon as you possibly could. Go buy a bat, wave it in front of your child, and say, “I’m not sending you to a good school just so you could become a prostitute, a druggie, or worse, a writer. You better not want to be a writer, child, or I’ll beat the verbs out of you.”

I wish my parents had beaten the verbs out of me.

If they had, I wouldn’t now constantly have bags under my eyes. I would never stay awake at night worrying I may have misused a punctuation, and people will actually talk to me on Facebook without apologizing for a missing verb or semi-colon, or both. I wouldn’t be writing letters to my bed, lungs, or PayPal balance. I also wouldn’t be wishing for terminal disease, heartbreak, an outbreak, or for a serial killer in the family just because it makes interesting material.

The worst part of it all? No one in the family goes into coma after hearing me mutter “Be still, chair!” because they’re used to it!

So please, if you love yourself, do not be a writer. Do not allow anyone in your family to be a writer. Do not go to a workshop I’m giving, too. Do yourself a favor and lead a full life. Go out and get a job that doesn’t allow you to lounge all day in your jammies. Go out, make friends, and stop raiding the fridge for food and metaphors. Trust me on this one: you do not want to write better. You do not want to write at all.

Unless, of course, it comes bursting out of you.

Can you people stop worrying about Mendoza and the kung fu of the Hong Kong community for a minute, and answer a very important question? Are shrimps really just huge insects?

I have always maintained that shrimps are nothing more than insects, in the same way that a cockroach is. No, this isn’t bitterness over being unable to eat shrimps because I’m allergic to them. Look at shrimps, people! Do they look cute to you? Useful? Adorable? Harmless? More to the point, doesn’t this deepwater shrimp look like it could be a relative of the cockroach?

Photo credit: Colorado State University

If diners were to be served a freshly killed, piping hot cockroach, I’ve no doubt they would run straight from the restaurant to the nearest police station, retching and itching to file charges. Yet people pay atrocious prices for shrimp, despite the fact that it has the FIVE biological qualities of an insect, specifically: (more…)

WARNING: Picture-heavy post. Might nuke your browsers, especially if you’re running IE.

Happiness may be good for my heart but it isn’t good for my creativity. I write best when I’m unhappy or discontent. Iris made a point about this before. “It’s drama that fuels our writing,” she wrote to me once. “We write best when our hearts are not at rest.”

‘course, I could have gotten the line wrong, but I’m sure I got the sentiment right.

Back when Iris was a single girl with a single toothbrush in her Bangkok flat and back when I was a 24-year-old who secretly cried in the office whenever I felt overwhelmed at having to play boss to 70 people or so (it was sudden; I wasn’t ready; no one prepared me), we wrote frequently and we wrote memorably. Now, I write without cheek, without color, without soul.  Sometimes, things get so mundane I even write about blackheads on nose. I’m not sure if I should be grateful or alarmed. On the one hand, I wish I wrote like I did before. But tell me, how can anyone complain about running out of angst?

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Before we moved, the most strenuous thing I ever did with my hands was hammer away at the keyboard. I spent afternoons napping, pounding away on the laptop, or meeting up with girl friends. I do not cook, clean, or do the laundry… but please do not think I’m a wife who does nothing but spend her husband’s money because I’m not. I work harder than anyone I know. I work til my eyes cross and sometimes, I don’t sleep for three days straight just to make sure we launch a product on time. But well, all that work, it’s mostly mental. At the end of each work week, it’s just my eyes, brain, and fingers that hurt.

But oh how things have changed!

No, my work hasn’t changed. I still run the same company for the same boss. However, I help out with the farm and mill work, too, and this is how it came to pass that I spent an entire afternoon counting rubber seedlings and helping haul them onto a ten-wheeler. By the time I finished counting and re-counting 3,128 rubber seedlings, my back hurt worse than it ever did my whole life, and my long, newly manicured fingernails looked like I ran them through a cheese grater before dipping them in mud. It’s not easy living here, I tell you! Right now, Wett and I will each give a kidney for massage tables we can plunk ourselves into.

These are rubber seedlings of the five-year variety. They are from Makilala. They’re being hauled onto a ten-wheeler so they can be transported to the farm early tomorrow morning, where they will be left to grow in peace. After five years, they can be tapped into all-year-round for the next 30 years. Yep, you can harvest latex every day for a quarter of a century, and these babies won’t groan. We do not sell rubber, though. At least, that’s not the plan. The plan is to put up a plant where we can manufacture latex products, mostly mattresses. Until that happens, the man and I will be traveling to Bukidnon to check out latex plants and see how things work. This early, I dread the dust and the bumpy roads. In case you’ve never heard me whine about this before, let me whine about this again: traveling to the remote areas of Mindanao sucks vacuum cleaners. You will be tossed this way and that, like salad. You will also end up inhaling so much dust it wouldn’t surprise anyone if you end up lugging a nebulizer, like me.

If you happen to be a friend who’s freaked out that I now know something about plant life, don’t worry. I’m just as freaked out by this development as you. Before this, the closest I ever got to plant life was watering the plants in my grandmother’s garden in the rare summers we spend at our maternal grandparents’!