Your Actions in Life Will Reflect in Eternity

Total Asia Swineflu Mask Count: 16
Portion of which found at the airport: 7

Once upon a time I went to Asia, made a lot of swineflu jokes, came back, and was afflicted with cough, runny nose, and slight raise in body temperature. Swineflu. is not. a joke.
(no, it totally still is)

Right now I'm trying to fix my jetlag. Last night I slept from 6pm-11:30, and I've been up since, and now I have that stinging headache you get when your body is just pissed that you've been up on the computer all night and you're not sleeping and you have swineflu.

I feel like I have a lot of things to say about the Philippines, but a proper recap post will never actually materialize. I turned into sort of an introvert over there, I think I lived a lot in my head and just stared out into the strange world around me and had conversations with myself. This resulted in a lot of observational-type writing, since 1) it is my favorite, and 2) it was all I could really do...observe. It feels like a weird shift from when I started this blog ranting about gender and sexuality and societal norms. Does anyone have strong feelings about this? Can I get some feedback? Maybe that's a school thing. Maybe I'm several different people, or at the very least several different writers. I'm nervous about this going back to school thing that's happening in less than three weeks. I'm not really sure who I became over the summer, or if I became anyone at all, or if everyone else became something and I didn't, or vice versa. Different post for a different time.

Hey look, here's this!

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'YOUR ACTIONS IN LIFE WILL REFLECT IN ETERNITY' is what the billboard said on the way to Makati. It wasn’t in front of a church, like a fun fact or a quick tip for eternal salvation. It wasn’t “Jesus is the way, the truth, the light” illuminating the side of a building, turning it all neon and glowing and casting a dim, colored light over Manila’s chronic traffic jams. Its letters were arranged, all caps, on what seemed to be the header of a former movie theater, as if weary traveling souls could stop in and have their 120-minute salvation session accompanied by popcorn and soda. I wish this was a movie. I wish it was the vehicle for Vin Diesel’s comeback.

I also wonder if there ever was a statement simultaneously truer to those with belief and more false to those without, though its something we wished were true. We wished it were true knowing that nothing survives an eternity, not even our own, knowing that eventually we’d all bend to question marks, then fade, and then what? Just a movie billing. Just a shrug.

-candles
-manila paper
-safety pins
-pastries
-cake
-postcards
-twister fries
-priest

We’ve been sent on an absurd scavenger hunt, my cousin and I. Today is the blessing of her family’s new house, and we’ve been made responsible for picking up all necessary supplies. And nothing is more necessary to a house blessing than a priest. The car ride is long because Manila traffic is notoriously unforgiving. Bumper to bumper at any and all times of day, drivers so aggressive that when it loosens up even bus drivers navigate their monolithic vehicles by weaving between cars. What do you listen to in the car with a priest? We think Coldplay. We’re not sure why. I don’t have any Coldplay on my iPod. I think this means I’m not meant to hang out with priests.

He’s wearing plaid, and this confuses me because I sometimes forget that priests are also people, and people sometimes wear plaid. He’s wearing a plaid shirt and faded blue jeans made of that really resilient material and he speaks loudly and gruffly as he laughs and tells us about barkless dogs and gives us advice on convenience stores where we can buy alcohol. He is not at all like the priests I've known in the States. They are old and stern and do not like plaid. They furrow their brows and move slowly and take careful, agonizing steps, their shoes are weighed down by the heaviness of soles. They do not know where I can buy cheap beer.

By the time the house creeps up on us, Gaby and I are singing along to the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back,” I am wondering how this song manages to seep into my life at all junctures and how, in every sense of the phrase, we've gotten to this point. Father Ben is happily tapping along in the front seat. Maybe he wants to hear “Billie Jean.”

The house is extravagant, beautiful, sweeping in that cold, modern sort of way. High ceilings, ever-expanding white interiors, stone floors, walls of windows like eyes dumbstruck and gazing into the abandoned house next door. It’s not yet been furnished. Six cardboard-wrapped chairs are lined up in the living room, and the granite dining table stretches the length of the dining room, flanked by plastic patio chairs. The workers tape our manila paper to the windows, obscuring the view. “The theme of tonight’s party is ‘Furniture Warehouse,’” says Gaby. She motions to the scaffolding outside the door, the pile of construction rubble on her front lawn. “Deconstruction under construction. Post-modern. Deep.” These are the kind of jokes you make when everyone you’re related to is an architect

Father Ben enters the house, shaking hands with our grandparents who sit demurely in the barely-furnished living room. He opens up his backpack and takes out his priestly robes, throwing them over his plainclothes. Oh, okay. There we go. Phew.

We’re lined up in the doorway, all of us. The air conditioners have yet to be functional, and in this short span of time, we’ve learned to gather in the corridor that runs straight from the front door to the dining room at the very back of the house. It’s breezy, which is relieving, unless you’re trying to light candles for a blessing, which we are. We’re jammed into the doorway and cannot focus on what I'm sure were Father’s sagacious words about hospitality and family and home. We’re too busy hovering over our candles, hands cupped over flames, shielding the flickering, flailing, frantic little lives on top of the wicks. My candle is out, we whisper. Can I light off yours? Oh, it’s out too. What’s he saying? Does this blessing still count if we’re just holding wax sticks?

Maybe it will be better once we’re in the house, like really in the house. We follow Father through the rooms as he sprinkles Holy Water over the Furniture Warehouse. He leads us in prayers, incantations, a repeated murmur of the Hail Mary. He loses some of us along the way. My grandparents can’t climb up the stairs, the train of people is too long to navigate the tight U-turns in the hallways. Didn’t we go into this room already? I’m waiting in the kitchen next to the KFC.

How are you even supposed to hold candles? Who the fuck forgot to get the paper to catch the wax? Oh, right.

I wince and swear as the wax drips over my fingers, down my wrist, onto my exposed feet.
And I remember that time I watched drops of wax turn opaque and harden on your chest. And how you gasped and grabbed my collar when your skin burned because I was new and clumsy and held the candle a little too close. And how, though I was intrigued by the flame, I knew I could never even try because my pain threshold was too low and besides, what had just happened to you made me feel nervous and stupid.

When did it happen that in my mind, that everything in my life turns to sex? I wonder if this is something like growing up or if I’m having a really prolonged adolescence or maybe I just watch too much TV. I’m like an explicit Midas. Straw to gold, blessings to sex. I wonder what’s with this business of turning things, transforming them. I wonder if this means growing up, and that maybe it's just nothing more than gracelessly executed alchemy.

I Have a Chronic Need to Explain Myself

1. Tonight is my last night in the Philippines. I will miss Biblical flooding and laying on the bed being too hot to move and being too shy to speak too much in public and getting drunk in my grandma's house after she insists that I eat lasagna.
2. Last night was my second to last night in the Philippines, and it was wonderful, and it reminded me feel that I have a lot to come back for.
3. There are gays here. As a general statement, they're cute and always willing to talk to my drunk ass.
4. Have you received your postcard yet? Well that's because I didn't send it. Here's a preview!

For anyone who doesn't know about Katrina 'Asian' Casino Postcard Project 2009, here's a brief explanation.

A couple of days before I left, I collected addresses of people who wanted postcards (this part is relatively straightforward). Now, I was going to write you all personalized rap songs, but as I have a tendency to always insist on being embarrassingly honest, I decided to put a spin on it (the postcard project, not the rap songs. That could come later though). I collected the names, and drawing them at random, assigned the recipients to one another. I also threw in some extra people who I haven't been talking to/didn't ask for a postcard. Just for funsies. And because I didn't have any dark secrets to reveal to some people. Everyone who's receiving a postcard is receiving a confession, secret, or general pointless rambling/crazytalk to another person. Just something I've never told them because I'm too awkward or shy or lazy or I have social tact or something (this is a lie, I have no social tact). Each postcard begins with "You don't know this, but" and then continues on to whatever one-sided conversation I wanted to have. I feel like this post is going to turn into some absurd Filipino post-secret ripoff, but sometimes that's just how it is.















Also I tried to get the tackiest postcards available.
Also I'm a really poor planner, and these will probably be mailed from New York.

So without further ado, I bring you a series of really serious statements followed by really hilarious pictures.

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You don't know this, but...

Sometimes I get a little scared that we'll never be who we were on that first night.

You're one of my favorites, but I'll never admit this to you because I'll always be too afraid to hear I'm not one of yours.

Everyone knows it's always been about you.

And I don't know if you'll ever believe it, but I'm fine.
(The rice paddies that my ancestors slaved on so that I'd never have to wear sunscreen in the summers)

Once I was lurking your Facebook page, and I accidentally liked one of your wall posts, then freaked out because I was way too high to figure out that I could unlike it.
(Alternatively: Meeting you was like meeting myself.)
(Fuck yeah, tigers!)

You and I both need to calm the fuck down.

I'm fully aware that all I really do is break promises to you.

You're the reason I question anything at all.
(Am I the only one who finds proud eagles of all nationalities to be hilarious?)

You're the reason for the flowers in my hair.

Every action that has defined our relationship has also perfectly and explicitly conveyed my deepest personality flaws in a way that I never could have anticipated or expressed.

When I was younger and thought that I wanted to get married and thought that I wanted to get married to a man, that man I pictured was just like you.
(Mabuhay a las Filipinas! We sell slippers, brooms, fans, and...wedding cakes made out of beads?)

Sometimes I find you to be so unbelievably plain that I can't help but find you irresistibly attractive.
(Hello, favorite.)

Though you probably do, I should have kissed you right when I had you.

I love you...not like that, not really, anyway.
(I don't know if I just haven't been paying attention, but I have never fucking seen one of these.)

I'm really sorry we didn't get to talk in the brief time we were together, that time we existed in 3D.
(I have no idea why I don't own one of these hats yet.)

I wasn't even really sure if I liked you until recently.

I think you're really beautiful.

You should stick around.
(Hi, drag show this year plz?)

You're a little boring, but you're so so sincere, and I guess that's okay.

You might well be the reason I don't regret coming home this summer.

(I ran out of photos/postcards, so here's a picture of me getting attacked by a crab at my grandma's house.)

This postcard was discarded because I couldn't verify its truth:

I'D LIKE TO KNOW what you think of this. What you think of that, that thing I just said. I'd like to know if you knew, and if you knew then when you knew and why you haven't said anything, and come to think of it, why I haven't said anything either, but I suppose that's not for you to answer. I'd like a lot of things. I'd like hot nights with rolled down windows and loud music. I want to sing along. I'd like questions without answers and open ends and true belief in possibility. I'd like the fifty-yard line. I'd like a deluge, a rainstorm, silencing the world outside my car; I'd like to drive with no headlights. I'd like to know the corner of your jawline and what it feels like to thread my fingers through your beltloops. I'd like the rooftop where I learned to smoke and sneak and eventually not get caught. I'd like my hometown nostalgia. Fuck, I'd like any nostalgia.

And I don't know if you know this, but when I'm gone, I miss you the most.

We're Sorry to Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Programming

This has nothing to do with the Philippines.
I've been writer's blockin' a little lately, and all I have to show for myself is a bunch of unfinished observational pieces (including a sequel to this one) and some uninspired afternoon poetry (actually a great concept if you like irony and facetious postmodern fuckery).

This, like my last post, is going to be sort of a clusterfuck, as my mind has been sort of a clusterfuck.

So I've decided to drop a lexicon post.
And then I realized I missed school a lot. So I'm dropping my first picture post as well.
Hi, I'm Katrina, and I can't focus anymore.

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interrobang (v) – 1. to engage in sexual activity resulting from ambivalent attraction; to commit the act of a questionable hookup. May result from drunkenness, desperation, poor judgment, or Welcome Week at American University.

2. though usually hypothetical, to engage in sexual activity with a person who is contrary to one’s “type.” May result from the same factors as definition #1, but is usually less embarrassing, as individual in question is probably at least a little attractive.

X: So you think she’s hot?
KC Danger: Yeah she’s pretty cute; I just don’t usually dig redheads.
X: So you wanna interrobang her‽
KC Danger: Yeah, I guess.

Origin
In collaboration with X Fantastic Walters

#smallearth (n) – 1. conceptually, a small-scale model of planet Earth. Although the exact dimensions of #smallearth have never been determined, it is commonly accepted that the planet is small enough that such nonsense as 12-hour time differences simply cannot exist, resulting in a cohesive society of #smallearthlings

2. a community that is so small, that it is entirely feasible for all or most of its members to somehow come in contact with each other, regardless of actual physical location; a significantly less lame way of saying “small world, eh?,” a community where an unspoken set of rules/tendencies exist

See: the lesbian community, the AUniverse
Origin
In collaboration with saintmodesto

AUniverse (n) – the self-sustaining microcosm existing at American University, also known as “the AU Bubble,” an example of #smallearth. Katrina Fucking Casino lives here. Rules of the AUniverse include: I’m-making-out-with-you-because-you’re-making-out-with-me, you’re probably gay, let’s get high and talk about gender, sorry I’m crashing from my uppers, Apex Thursdays, drinking on Tuesdays due to classless Wednesdays, and TDR at 2 y/n?

S.W.I.M. (n) – acronym for Straight, White, Ignorant Male, a privileged individual who outright ignores the existence or opinions of women, racial minorities, or gays. Essentially the reason you felt really uncomfortable during high school, that guy who keeps making ignorant comments in your gender studies class (what the fuck, why is he even in this class?)

50s House Dyke (n) – a lesbian who aspires to be a traditional stay-at-home mom. A 50s house dyke is not an assimilationist; rather, she is a well-educated, articulate feminist who simply chooses a domestic lifestyle

In collaboration with ilikeyourshirt
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Oh hey, remember that time I was short-haired and freshly pierced?

We were alone for the first time

And in love with everyone we met.

We were so curious about each other

That we forgot to wonder about ourselves
And who we'd be in a few short months.

So...

We got drunk

In public

A lot.

We got drunk in public a lot.

And no one ever slept alone.

I am sometimes embarrassed because I'm prone to getting really emotional (ex. short-term nostalgia) late at night, but for everyone else, it's just the middle of the day.
This would never happen on #smallearth.

What Am I, a Bicycle?

Or, The World Clock on My Phone Means Nothing
Or, There Are Motherfucking Cats Fighting on the Roof, and I Think I Just Heard One Fall Off

I was going to do a pretty dry, straightforward post about what's been going on the past week, but that got difficult as I have too many feelings, and I still can't properly structure any of my thoughts. I go between feeling elated then lonely then listless then frustrated. I can't quite figure out what I'm doing here yet. I think I'm on vacation. I don't know what that means.

Anyway, since I'm obviously going crazy, I've just compiled a couple of stream-of-consciousness deals I've written over the past few days. Sometimes I'm almost coherent, but it's not something I'd like to get used to.

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IF A TRAIN LEAVES from Montreal at 8:30 am on July 23, and a plane leaves from Manila at 11 am on July 24 but also at 11 pm on July 23, at what point will the difference in time zones start to make sense? When will I understand what day it is? What will it feel like when I’m hurtling through time in the body of an aircraft, a time machine cleverly disguised as a plane? What will it feel like when the world unfreezes, again engaging in its perpetual motion, and I am awakened from this listless existence where I am haunted by the shuffling feet of lethargy and ennui? Will my days still blend together? Will they continue to lie before me, stretching out into infinity as if in a perspective study, their only end an early night’s sleep? What day is it now? It wouldn’t make a difference.
-
I think that, if I stared hard enough, I could make myself into you.
I think that maybe I’ve been studying without knowing, tracing dotted lines and cutting out patterns. But no matter how hard I try or how closely I look, I will always be only the paper doll version, cardboard clothes falling off at their poorly bent creases.

Maybe what I really want is to turn you into me, because maybe the only person I’ll truly love is myself. The only person who won’t ever leave is me, and even that’s a little questionable. If I turned you into me, would you leave? Or would I decide that I didn’t like myself and abandon you in your paper doll clothes? Probably. I’d let you turn to pulp in the rain, and I would know that you couldn't chase me.
-
THERE SHE GOES again disrupting the poetry of her collarbone.
A flash of red is a plea that you’ll remember her face, because she won’t tell you her name.
Her walk is brutal, her hips, her skinny, swaggering boy hips, unforgiving.
I’ll always think she hates me.
-
Sometimes
When I am drunk
My thoughts
Move vertically.

This also happens
When I am talking crazy.
-
I wonder sometimes if I made you up, or if it was the other way around. I wonder if you made me into you. Maybe that’s why you left.
-
Last night I meant to write a series of drunk emails.
Instead I threw up in my grandma’s bathroom.
And knocked over a picture of the Pope.
My cousin passed out on the couch.
And our grandma found her at 4am with all the lights on.
Today a really wide truck tried to get through a narrow street where our car was.
My aunt rolled down the window.
Translated, she yelled,
“What is this? What’s going on? What am I, a bicycle?”

I’m staying here an extra nine days.

I'm Very Big in Asia, Just Like Zac Effron and Korean Pop Stars

Or, Now Is the Typhoon Season of Our Discontent

So I don't know if you guys heard, but 1) I'm on the other side of the world!, and 2) I'm totes a pretentious fuck. That being said, the first installment of my Filipino blog series (maybe they will pick it up as a Filipino tv show complete with games, midgets, and sexy ladies) is an introduction to the cast of characters here (actually, just my grandparents, really) written in the third person. That was really just a device to get the introduction started, and it felt really stupid afterward, but it sort of eventually became too late to change, and so it remained.

I have a lot more to say and a muddled melange of ways in which I may decide to say them, but that's for another time, possibly drunk or in list form or in both. I'm sort of in sensory overload right now, so forgive me if my reaction has been to mute the colors.

H'okay!
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Katrina Casino was not a pen name—you can check, it says it right there on her birth certificate. Katrina Casino was a writer, and therefore, she did writerly things. Absent-minded and spaced out, she wandered through the mundane occurrences of her days imagining the metaphors or complicated verb-adverb combinations that would one day make her feel brilliant, artsy.

She sat cross-legged on couches in the middle of the afternoon while everyone was sleeping, laptop open, coffee untouched, doing her writerly duties—that is, leaving a blinking cursor lonely on a new Microsoft Word document while she spent copious amounts of time on Facebook, Twitter, AIM. She had no concept of time, except when it came to deadlines, and even then, it was a bit questionable. As a writer, a blogger, a music journalist, she touted her hip, contemporary occupation when around those of her generation, but hid it behind a reluctant business degree when talking to elders and relations, as this usually solicited disapproving head shakes and pitying advice.

This was a lesson learned best when she visited her grandmother, a woman who, in her younger days could both drink her brothers’ friends under the table and design and repair her sisters’ dresses. As a mother, she stayed up weekend nights waiting for her prodigal sons to arrive home so that she could beat them with a rolled up copy of that morning’s newspaper and berate them for making their mother stay up and worry. Nowadays she was an immensely talkative and wonderfully cockeyed grandmother whose half-squint couldn’t help but elicit suppressed giggles from those whom she scolded.

“Don’t study communications!” she exclaimed upon Katrina’s confession concerning writerly ambitions. “Everybody knows how to communicate, they all just talk-talk,” she said as she leaned in, widening one eye, as she was very serious, “but business, that’s how you make money!”

It was all very…Filipino.

Very Filipino, just like her grandmother’s tendency to add extra syllables to everyday words like lipstick (lipeestick) or upstairs (upeethestairss), or her aunt’s misspoken invitation to the movies. “Come with us to see Transformer!” (only one).

While all this transpired, Nicasio Costiniano sat at the dining table, smoothing out the creases in the linen. Katrina’s grandfather was now a man of few words, affection and approval coming in the form of exchanges like, “You reading a book?” Yes. “Good,” though years ago he was an engineer, designing runways for the military in the War and playing the piano at bars to pick up extra scratch. Ten years ago he could be found on the front lawn of the Casino household, instructing pavers on how to reconstruct the Casino driveway. Six inches of sand, four inches of gravel, a layer of cement. You didn’t have to, but goddamn, if you wanted to, you could land an aircraft on that motherfucker.

Nicasio could always be spotted around the house in his characteristic white t-shirt and boxers. The women lounged around in loose, floral printed dresses that they called dusters. Everyone knew that this was a euphemism for mumu, though no one really realized they were creating a euphemism for mumu, or that they thought one necessary at all. But fuck if Katrina Casino should ever be caught dead in a mumu, or even a duster—what kind of self-respecting tomboy does that—she donned the boys’ uniform, striped boxers and all.