Year: 2021

Pondering domesticity

Reading Time: 7 minutes

I remember how much I dreaded the idea of settling down when I was a teenager. It meant to resign oneself to gated communities in Manila, hour-long drives to take your children to Catholic school, and empty pleasantries at Sunday mass for the rest of your life. In my raw, unexposed head –– there was nothing more foreign and undesirable. Nothing farther from passion. The imagery of man and wife strolling across malls rioted in my mind. My sister passing me off in a sweltering church, sweat and little gore past decades-old lace. Settling down in terms of Catholic womanhood meant to forego all of one’s love and potentialities to entirely devote yourself to another. (Do I not do this today, or at the very least seek to?)

In the age where half your friends don’t know how to drive and the other half are falling madly, deeply in love. So deeply that they begin considering human permanence. One friend concusses and sees god, another one swears that they found Him in themselves after someone had shown it to them. (I’ve seen it all along––but I suppose seeing one thing and convincing another that the thing was in them the whole time is a far larger issue.) My love becomes my child. My love becomes the way I love my friends, how much laughter I bring in them. Love here is futile and fleeting; there is only so much that I can project. People find other forms of love. People find new things comparable to love everyday, without idea of how to call it.

A lot of my notions of domesticity revolve around the presence of a physical space. In Manila, anytime not spent in school or the mall would be one at home. My house was where I walked for the first time, where I said ‘I love you’ (yes––over the phone, as what happens in incredibly repressive home life), where I heard the best and worst news of my life. Most of the times, I forget how lucky I was to live in a relatively large home in some suburban place in southern Manila. It had no yards and at 4AM every weekday, we would trek to the inside from our pebbled garage, stained yellow and black from grime and running water flooding in from the back kitchen. I probably stepped on the sparse patches of grass in front of our house no more than a handful of times, and walked through our front gate less. All the front of our home was to us was a place of passing. There were was no waving or lingering there as one would, no porches or delight; in fact, it was beneficial to, as much as possible, act like there was nobody in the house for fear of invasions––or fear of having to leave the front lights one.
The more I think about it, the more I realize how little I know about my house beyond the room I grew up in. I could count the amount of times I stepped on the sparse patches of grass at the front of our house on my fingers, or ever walked through the main doorway. I rarely embraced the narrow walkways that made the edges of our houses connect with neighbor to neighbor (where at their narrowest point, you would have to squeeze your body sideways) the rusting mounds on each of their gate’s carapace, telling not only of security in the physical sense but the emotional. Here, after more than a decade of living, we entrust these secret passage with the katulongs of the other house. They know and can trace every footstep along it more vicariously than anything else. At one opoint, I believed several had a conflicting memoir for me as I slept: the subjected human, the impaling and the testament delivered at the moment of death,

Most of my relationship to family has then been lived in through cars and passing places. The three hour car rides it would take to get to school and back, the other three hours it takes to drive up to Tondo as I memorize the streets and avenues from the back by the way they blur in my periphery, feeling familiarity with the bumps on the pavement and sharp turns south to Cavite. When I went to Yale and spent, for the first time, more than a week without really stepping foot in any vehicle––I realized how much of domesticity has been resigned to false notions of distance. When I stepped into a car (really the first vehicle, no bus, train, or anything else) for the first time after months, I almost physically winced at the strangeness of leather and metal against skin again. The air freshener stung and with my mind like a child’s once again, we went on the highway and I imagined myself jumping outwards––racing across the objects in the window as I would whisk myself over telephone poles and squatter homes.

With friends, I dream of simple things. I’m not sure if we abhor domesticity because the house is an impossible image more than some sacred one. The idea of convention to burn a body, the promise of holding our hands in places that both the sun can reach and where god will consider forgiving us. An apartment in Makati where we can walk to both the grocery and the schools. A garage or no need for one. A dream of living in the same twenty-mile vicinity without taking three hours to get to one another. We overlook the Manila Bay where the water no longer bubbles black, and may even dare to drink water from the tap instead of getting weekly deliveries of plastic gallon barrels that we use to measure. I no longer taste iron or smoke when I lick my lips. I wake up to a sweltering sun and allow myself to be taken by it.
We place ourselves in western fantasy, too. Cottagecore life with the girls where we move into rural nowhere and tend to flowers and become our true selves. Commune in the middle of a European country where we can even begin to consider a lifestyle that does not revolve around our work. Sometimes I’m not sure at which point these desires tread more into the unreal, and which ones are just shuttered down by capitalist dreams.

In this narrative, we resign ourselves to the tenderness and care of one another. The fantasy might make itself as much because there is no where else where we can easily imagine ourselves as safe; the seeming absurdity of a blood bond reinforced and as concrete as little else. No man or being but us.

We’re compelled by little things like the friend hang where we loiter around grocery aisles and spend hours finding flour, stand in line for hours outside the Department of Foreign Affairs with bottles of water, paying bills and finding each other.

Proximities might easily be mistaken as care, though it also feels like the latter can only ever thrive with the former. (Again, I dream of bringing everyone I love in the same place.) With my friends, I’ve developed this newfound urgency to know and be in their presence always (whatever possible, physical distance aside) after what feels like a lifetime of recklessness and suffering. In my childhood home, I wandered around my room over and over and circled a place that still has always felt so alienating. (The summer after I returned from college for the first time, I looked at the ‘now-childhood’ bedroom and barely saw remnants of myself, bare physical artifacts and unrepaired wear and lights the most glorious signs that something had happened, something had been.)
I haven’t been home (‘Philippines’) in three years. I see glimpses of the family in photos, everyone with hair graying out and changing. My father no longer offers to carry my bags up into the car––I do it myself. I turn the lights off myself, no questions asked. I wonder how they feel when they look back into the body of a baby they once nestled, the whole of my life present in front of them and an end they’re not likely to see. I see everyone walking in slow motion, unbearably so, as my own clock feels itself speeding a million miles an hour to a life I was never prepared the consequences for.
I feel compelled to just rush in once again, like I did before I was the child who stopped talking. I bring back rooms into raucorous laughter at the expense of my own self. I perform, and everyone gathers. Everyone is so alive.

There appears to be an unknowable final time for all things. The last time we all convene together for drinks, the last time I sit in the kids table (if ever), the last time we find ourselves in the same Sunday mass. I wonder how many ‘final times’ I have reached with my loved ones there. At least I know the spaces that had contained it.

I like these compressed spaces and the apartment dream. I don’t need to see the world. (What I’m telling myself now, at least.) I can experience it through these brief glimpses of enchantment… in the slo I need to see the people I love tending to their morning coffees and their wounds, I need to desecrate every inch of a box and make my being irreversible. Alternatively, I need to make so many memories and links to spaces that some part of me becomes unquestionably tethered. People walk in and say someone had existed. And it becomes the most lasting thing.

Outside of friendship. I become a realist again. Human beings tend to feel that they must be connected to one other only, that only what they produce can ever truly be theirs. I go back and forth between saying I want kids, jokingly saying that bringing kids in to this world is one of the true mortal sins (both to someone who never asked to be born under this climate, and the world as it ends unto itself). I think about the impossibility of spending my life with one other; where I begin clawing to see a world again when the home I dream of can be a space of convention and transference. Come and go. Begin trading little signs of life. Am I in search for a physical location, a temporal state, or a network of relationships––as if any of these can form what I beg slats can give me? A ceiling stained with smoke and laughter. Mythologies themselves manifest and come alive under the roofs of my friends’ mouths; we begin swallowing futures whole and making worlds that cannot be contained.

But who am I to judge the shame that might be held in an experience I’ve yet to feel? I wonder how we measure the rate of change in people: by their losses, their dwellings, all their gains––how nothing but history can be witness to their enormity, and perhaps in our lifetime, roof slats can stand in for that.

And when I picture myself trying to fill the rooms in my life whole, I look forward to hearing stories and taking in fragments of the new lives that people have lived. Is what I dream of now so different than the carnal state of the home? Or is it fatally flawed because we were meant to walk across the earth? Is it impossible to contain the human life in a concrete dwelling and also dream of constancy and persistence? How can I reclaim this world for all of us? Or at the very least, for myself?

Performing myself, seeking love

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Recently, a friend told me that I’m one of those people who are the sum of their interests. Most known for that, at least. A now-dated meme goes something like, “liking X is not a personality trait“, “hating X is not a personality trait“. Liking field recordings, listening to Phoebe Bridgers, not liking the taste of alcohol, not being into crypto––whatever. I see this and spin into a mild (and irrational) existential crisis. What am I but the pieces of the things that have made me?

The first theory attributes this all to a modern need for hyperlegibility and the constant entering-exiting of spaces. Write bullet point things about yourself, turn traumas into fuel for scholarship, compress your identity into the palatable. People contain themselves in a bio and highlighted tweet, in bylines and extended “my friend Y said Z acts like…”. The enormity of human experience and desire compacted. Mel Nguyen presents an abundance of questions on this: When are you really saying the things you want to say? When do you engage with a subject vs. when do you show a subject? When are you over-reliant on proximity to names, institutions, power? …When are you being ‘you’ vs being the ‘image of you’?
I have so little time that I find myself most comfortable positioned relative to the already digestible. Unfortunately, this method is most successful when dictating yourself to things in power, often formed by people of power.

I remember one drastic personality change that happened in my life. Growing up, I was an immensely hyperactive child: I’d scream and cry for the things I wanted, run all over malls, say yes to so many things. I’d sing at birthday parties (even for the distant relatives) and identify with Ashley Tisdale’s Sharpay. And I felt so loved in the classic way. The one where you make acquaintance-friends easily, have worlds worth of gleeming praise for you because you are seen enough to be loved, your parents tell you how you are sunshine. Somewhere past the first few grades when I started going very online, I developed a more conscientious and reserved sense of self, the type mistaken for rudeness and indifference to the world. A lot of this might have been because of the new media that I was exposed to: narratives in mundane parts of Naruto that got me to think about power, conversations on internet forums that helped me say no a bit more in real life, shedding a submissive self that I had initially been born to perfect. Because these early influences weren’t around me, I craved more of it and attached myself to any other people who shared the same interests because it was the clearest sign that they understood what mindset shift I was going through. Suddenly I was described as callous and robotic. If you like this song, I know there’s at least an inkling of you questioning god, too. Specific shows, songs, and books formed subcultures where it was safe to explore bits of yourself in an overly-repressed world––and we know how popular opinion on that turned out.

Even if the things I enjoy are no longer as shunned as they were in cruel, chastising 13-something years of religious school, I haven’t let go from the mindset it harbored. It’s safer to be with people who already love what I love. It’s difficult for me to translate all the languages and lessons cultivated over the years; it is difficult to anchor someone long enough to get them to listen. I am essentially saying that I don’t know if I am worth taking the time to understand.

This is not to say that mainstream media can’t transform. Squid Game and Parasite are some of the most overt pieces of class critique, same with America’s high school required reading lists. I read Nineteen Eighty-Four and it kickstarted this childish period of activism within me back when I was thirteen, but was never pushed into first doing so. I wonder if they fly over people’s heads so frequently / lose their critical power because of the way they’ve been served to the masses. There is potency in self-discovery, in the community and ritual of self-seeking… of being difficult and complex to love––if there even was any simple form of it extant.

The second theory is just that fuck, I have this fear that I am so unlovable on the surface. Without my body of work and influences present, am I even worth knowing? I mean this in the physical sense now. In a world where attention and time are our most finite resources, there is absolutely no reason that one would pick me out and desire to know me. I have this unbearable, irrational fear even if I am surrounded with people who love me and hear me even when I refuse to look at myself for weeks. Maybe this is just a normal thing. I’m tenuous and hypercritical. Some believe we are in no obligation to know everyone, we pick, and pick, and I wonder if I ever will be. Everyone I deeply admire, especially to the point of ruthlessness, I’ve picked apart and felt endeared by because of what they produce and how they do it.

I wrote this piece earlier in the year that went around a bit about professionalism and authenticity inspired by a then-seemingly fun decision to place mangacaps on my personal site, reminiscent of what I used to do when building out Naruto fansites when I was eleven years old or so. What does that even mean? There’s nothing intrinsically authentic about that. You like something. How does it make you? I groan already at anyone who lines their walls with merchandise and no substance, but fall into the same issue. I want to know how it speaks to you and where you have come from––not that I articulate this myself. ‘Authenticity’ isn’t encapsulated in the boring ass designer bio line of “When I’m not on Figma, I enjoy…“––and it can’t be substituted for either in pretentiously trying to display every little fragment of yourself elsewhere––but I do it anyway.

Another part of the theory is that this is all an act of self-preservation. In performance, I choose how to save myself. I look over my obsession with listing out what I consume: it’s primarily for archival and commentary, yes, but there’s also a big aspect of performance. I’m talking about Spotify playlists (what goes on the profile or not), Last.fm, Letterboxd, MyAnimeList. Deciding what to mark as my favorite, as if I don’t know my favorites, maintaining sacred lists and leaving out the most embarrassing things (less often done in today’s time, very few things can’t be defended as some ironic intake, anyway). One fixation after the other, earmarked for one to see. If I don’t write about how I lived, who else will write it for me?

Sometimes I do this inane thing where I go through the first few scrolls of my social profile and judge the highlight reel of me. What would people think of? Does this look good? Does it represent my interests, or am I tweeting too much about one specific thing? Why do I use my blog to decompress all my teenage feelings instead of internalizing and ironing this out elsewhere? How do I curate my presence so I seem irresistible?

I love things, and if I do love them, then perhaps people will love me through them. I might have to become them in the process, but that’s an issue for later.

But do things make me at all? I fall in love with a movie still am the same person; I replay something eight minutes long over a hundred times in the span of four days and there’s nothing new. (Though I definitely overconsume music.) There’s little observable difference, if anything. Encounters with beautiful pieces of writing and sound become as tender and intentional as the way meeting new people leave marks on my life. It changes where I position my hand when I laugh, the way I elaborate on the news (or don’t), how often I pause on my walks to the next destination and sacrifice a bit on the clock to view the textured stippling of cloud in the sky.

Theoretically, the idea of remaking ourselves everyday is infinitely interesting yet impossible to me. There is no reason for me to be as silent as I am the next day; I thrash and thrive on the precarity of being alive to thousands of strangers in the internet and not knowing what to say after hello on the streets. I wonder how much of this is because of my own disgust at how I physically present and am seen, or because there’s no space to retreat in real life, or because I know that the digital sphere has given me sufficient space to curate and explain myself that I instantly feel more at ease with stranger-acquaintances who know me more than people I’ve known for years.
The impossibility comes from wondering if I even know all the selves I could remake myself as. I see the people around me, yes, but nothing among them I want to become. What makes a voice louder, a thought softer? (Maybe these processes and thoughts are part of why I feel a bit obsessive when I finally can find a framework to latch myself onto?)

Something I realized lately was that I minimize a lot of what I do and love, particularly with people not directly around me in that space. That is, my answers to “how has your week been” or “how did the event go” become terribly curt and almost defensive––”it went okay, I’m not that good” before someone has even had the opportunity to be surprised or otherwise. It’s not even the issue of everyone at this university being immensely complex and successful such that enormous exchanges are casual––I just don’t explain how I feel or what I do at all.
This likely comes as a response to years and years of trying to explain what I love to people and them just laughing it off or not taking time to do so when growing up (hence the need to find people with my own interests). I forget that there are people now who do want to listen. I forget that to be heard, I must let myself speak.

Like many other fumbling, theory-driven designers, I’ve been thinking a lot about speculative design. I have been slowly trying to articulate the gratitude I feel for fandom and fantasy, along with what can be gleamed from unreality. To 450 students at 1:30AM, I talked about ‘Worlding a New Philippines‘ through Genshin Impact, fantasy, and joy––what it means when institutions can learn from new worlds, worldmaking, and the dangers of subjecting our realities to be designed by the few elite who do not best understand us.

This approach to ‘authenticity’ involves a lot of reconciliation with seemingly dangerous, unproductive interests like videogames, music twitter, and the like that I feel a lot of younger people need to hear. The approach also of course, focuses entirely on how we process and externalize these fantasy domains unto our worldview and reality. Clearly I’ve been running around in circles. You can read about it here.

I wish I didn’t make it so difficult for people to like me. There’s obviously a potential whataboutism there that goes something like––if I could be my genuine self without performance, then it means that I’m truly at ease with someone. Perhaps what happens between these events can even be considered as love. Performance might be integrated with how we live; maybe I like to scream what I love out, maybe I am the process of consuming and settling. Struggling with explaining how I live and have fallen into the things I have is something I’ll continue working on.

Closing confession: I feel endlessly indebted to anyone who gives me the smallest bit of attention for what I make. I turn my process into letters for the world. I become infatuated in anyone who cares to love what I love, especially if it was discovered through me. I think sharing in the things that make us is love, or the process of loving, or the in between that might be one of the those things so human, yet so close to magic. If realities are constructed rather than given, I wonder how much of our world is reliant on us saying things to one another, or believing easier. A human word becomes truth. A human word becomes reality. A human word swallows itself.

One day, I want to love someone as hardly as I love the things that make me.


What I thought about while writing this

  • https://subpixel.space/entries/the-disbelievers-guide-to-authenticity/
  • https://www.are.na/paige-h/performing-myself
  • https://www.are.na/chia/on-loving-being-loved
  • https://www.rookiemag.com/2013/04/the-quiet-importance-of-angst-y-art/
  • My friends, the people who listen despite it all – thank you

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