Confessions of a Teenage Runagay

AND THAT'S WHAT IT WAS. Running away was supposed to be arduous, maybe treacherous. And although it was terrifying, when it came to the rough-and-tumble-hitchhiking-living-out-of-a-knapsack lifestyle, I lucked out. There was a small house, there was a big house, there were a bed and a couch respectively, and each night I played out mild nightmares of prodigal return.

I was high every day. I was drunk every night. And in my sleepy mornings in between desperate glasses of water, my headspin caused the makeshift sleeping bag glide against the floorboards. It felt as though a reckless inertia was driving the particles of my body away from each other, which made sense since - as far as Rockland County is concerned - I've vanished into a black hole anyway.

And there you were the whole time, unfalteringly, unwaveringly beautiful. Like watch you in the car when you close your eyes to sing along beautiful. Like hazy teenage trips to the back of my mind when I would trace the shapes of girls for the first time. Now at 19, I'm old enough to feel embarrassed about it but young enough to clumsily hope for more.

We couldn't always hold hands in public, but we could make out in your car. And we did. In a very specific way. Like gravity, like collision. Like the way two teenagers make out in an airport parking lot, hungry and impatient, because that was who and where we were. An agreement made in a fever dream. We felt scared, but never alone. We felt right (we were right). We felt stupid ("We are so stupid"). We felt big (it's still true).

Because I knew that if I knocked long enough at the curve of your ribs, if I lingered just a bit, your anachronistic heart would wake, answering me suddenly, and I would be granted permission to live within the walls of your body.

And you didn't even come with any weird surprises. Not even a tacky winter coat.

In my time here I learned to talk to animals. I feel like that makes it sound like I fell flaming from the sky into the desert, where I was rescued by Bedouin people and given special powers. Or like I'm Eliza Thornberry (and however she got her powers, I don't really remember). In actuality, I just met a dog that didn't know she was a dog and a cat that thought I was a cat. Animal-queer is what Charles said. And I thought it was funny. And then I hid behind your best friend because the cat kept hissing at me.
--
Postcards from Mexico.
Postcards from Dallas.
Postcards from the road.

I am in none of these places, not right now, but they are from where I'm sending my love. It's unrequited, the way we all secretly like it, because there's no return address. Because there's no return, not really, anyway.

I just can't believe I left all my underwear at home. Scratch that, I can't believe I left all my underwear where my parents live.

I'll eventually have to trek it back to the East Coast. And if I could go back on wheels, I would. Fuck, If I could go back on foot, I would. I would send my love not from the places I am, but from the places I've been, so even if you try to go looking, you'll just find tire tracks and whispers, if that.

This is my pledge to never stop moving.

(If anyone feels so moved to read more on the adventures, check out my Autostraddle piece toooo).

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!
================================================

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.

Something About Airplanes

Location: Seoul, Korea
Time: 5:41 am

I believed in God on runways and starting lines. Crouched waiting for the gun or strapped tightly to my seat, I murmured incantations with every breath, crossed myself an innumerable amount of times, praying for agility, success, safety. I quit track three years ago, effectively halving my belief, and my family has stopped traveling since trying to save for college. God and I haven't spoken in about two years.

It was necessary today/tonight/last night/I don't understand time though, as we sat on the runway, the standard safety video playing, preparing us for our flight. Showing us how to blow up our life vests in case of an emergency water landing.

I fucking hate those videos.
I don't know if I'm neurotic or paranoid or insane, but for me, those videos force me to imagine every possible scenario in which the plane could crash over and over and over again, and all it has to offer as solace is a pigtailed Korean girl calmly applying an oxygen mask to her face. Or a business-suited man manually blowing up his life vest because the ripchord didn't work. And in my own morbid fantasies of falling from the sky, the asshole with the malfunctioning life vest is always me.

Airplanes scare me because they don't make sense.
They're giant carriers floating in the air, carrying lives and luggage and and...metal. Giant winged creatures with turbines. Just floating. Flying. I don't like to think about it, because I'm always convinced that these things run on pure belief. I'm like Wile E. Coyote, running off a cliff, suspended in the air, until he looks down, until he stops believing. Until he falls out of the air with nothing but a picket sign reading "Yikes!" left to remind everyone of what happened.

But something happens when you take off from New York at night. It's something surreal.
The plane picks up speed, rumbles, takes off, tilts and banks until the glow of New York City becomes visible through the tiny windows. The streets are real at first, filled with cars, cabs, pedestrians. But eventually they shrink and fade, and the city and the plane do each other the mutual favor of disappearance, Manhattan becomes an incandescent grid, and the airplane a blinking memory, a twinkling apostrophe in the sky.

The airplane is absurd because people have no common sense and like to put words where they don't belong. I can listen to "Blackout" by Britney Spears while playing "In-Flight Tetris." Like I needed to be reminded that I was on a plane. Like in-flight Tetris is somehow different from safe-on-the-ground Tetris. It's like the Seattle Cafe's Original Classic Burger. Hamburgers are a classic American staple. Tetris on a plane is in-flight Tetris.

These are the things I have to contemplate on my 14-hour flight. I have three more hours in this terminal, and another 4 to Manila. I could bitch about how, by the time I touch down again, I'll have been traveling for about 30 hours, but when you think about it, what's 30 hours when it gets you to the other side of the world? Think about the months and months it took to round the tip of Africa. It takes 30 hours to get to the other side of the world. Think about all the people on the plane. Replace "people" with "lives," "stories." We're all being taken somewhere.

Have a Great Summer

There's no best part about quite literally not living anywhere, because every single part is the best part. I mean this totally and completely. I carry my life on my back, I have absolutely no responsibilities, I fall into the stories of the people around me, drink beer, and live my life so well that I cannot even comprehend it. My every day is enhanced by the excitement and mystery of where I'll fall asleep that night and what I'll do when I wake up the next morning because for once, I am free of obligations and may really and truly do anything.

I'm calling it urban backpacking.

(Partially because the only reason I can afford to do this is because of my privilege and my parents' permission, but whatever. It's the end, not the means).

The worst part is that, being the last one to leave of those who are leaving, I have to watch everyone go. I have cleverly evaded this by occupying myself just enough so that I've managed to not say goodbye to the majority of people who have meant the most to me this past year. And I would almost feel guilty about this, but I don't. Goodbyes don't mean much to me at all. I mean, they do, but not nearly as much as my time previously spent with a person that made an emotional goodbye expected or worth it at all. I don't say goodbye because 1) they're rarely permanent, and 2) I don't want the last time I see a person for quite a while to end up being some awkward, fumbling, sad attempt at a summary of what our friendship has meant, and 3) you already know that I want you to have a great summer. That's basically it. I love people too much for goodbyes, and my verbal skills often fail me, leaving me with a lot of regrets and "I wish I had said's," and that's not anything that anyone needs to bother with.

The last time I saw you, I probably just left it at "later."
Because that's really all it is, you know?

As Far As Waking Up in the Beds of Strange Girls Goes

I think this one may be my favorite.
Probably partially because it wasn't like that, but also because free housing in Montreal is the shit, second only to finding out that that connection you thought you've been making with someone without ever seeing them is actually real and staying up until 4 in the morning watching/mocking The L Word is completely worthwhile.

Anyway, her name is Emily, and we sometimes have similar thoughts, though she's a little more music/photography-oriented and sometimes writes in a more stream-of-conscious style. Read it though. She's got a maple leaf tattooed on her arm, and that's how you know someone is worth your time.

This post is also about Canada.

Lately I've been doing this thing where I'm really cautious about throwing whimsical statements into the air because I've picked up this habit of actually following through.

Among the results of this are my previously mentioned night at the Potomac, thirteen hours of travel for about a day and a half in Montreal, and a rediscovered affinity for girls in v-neck T-shirts. These are a few of my favorite things.

Montreal was immensely rewarding. It taught me that the exchange rate of spending time with people in other countries is about double (potentially because of travel time), that swing dancing is difficult, that there are lighters so tacky that they shock even me, that you cannot make right turns on red in Montreal, and that, yes, I can speak enough French to negotiate last-minute sleeping arrangements in the corridor of a hostel under a bookshelf containing both a French translation of 100 Years of Solitude and the Dr. Phil reader. Brilliant.

Traveling for no reason. It's the only reason.