coffeebased

So, last Monday, my advisor told me that I would be allowed to defend my thesis proposal this April.

I was pleased of course. I distinctly remember being pleased as I crouched in an empty corridor, and tried to stop hyperventilating. It took me around fifteen minutes to get my breath back.

This was, of course, just in time for me to saunter over to the Discipline Office to receive my first Minor Offense EVER in my whole life. I really don't know how I could have managed to escape such a badly-executed high school and college career with nary a slap on the wrist, and managed, at the ripe old age of twenty-five, to mar my clean record with an offense for multiple counts of leaving my ID card at home.

I had to write an apology letter and EVERYTHING. The humiliation was almost enough to induce me to superglue my ID to the inside of my arm. I swear that I am an adult.

Anyway, back to my thesis, I'm torn between absolute trust in my own capacity as a free-thinking, rational person, and the thought that I am going to fuck this up so badly. I actually had a nightmare about incorrectly harvesting ticks from a water buffalo and getting GORED for it. Agh.

I am going to do this. I am going to be a scientist, and so help me God, I am going to BETTER PEOPLE'S LIVES.

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My head is spinning from "Crucible of Gold" by Naomi Novik. I swore up and down that I wouldn't let any book skip ahead of my lengthy, and semi-abandoned, reading list, but then we always knew that that was a lie, because Terry Pratchett's coming out with THREE books this year, and I am only one person.

Oh my, that was a lot of commas. You'll have to excuse me; I am running on well-written military fantasy, and I can barely cope with the swirling images that have resulted from reading "Crucible of Gold". I may have to re-read it again, and soon, because I gulped that novel down in two hours with barely any time to rest between thrilling action sequences and amazing revelations! I will use more exclamation points!!!

Everything I missed about the series after reading "Tongues of Serpents" has come back and pickled my brain. And now, I'm done AGAIN, and stuck waiting for the next book. THIS ALWAYS HAPPENS TO ME.

Ugh. I'm waiting for Sian and Kam to wake up, because seriously, SERIOUSLY, my heart cannot contain all the feelings and my brain is seizing in on itself from all the ideas. I can't believe that there are only two novels left in the series. Ugh, it was so well-written, and beautiful, and perfect. I am trying to be as vague as possible so as to not spoil it for anyone who still reads my Livejournal.

All right. I should probably go to sleep or something.

Blogger's Note: Late last month, Fully Booked's Lucy sent out a call for bloggers to write about Batman. This whole blogging thing is in line with David Finch's upcoming book signing in the Philippines. You can check out more details regarding that here at the website for the event.

Now, I like reading Batman comics, and I love being able to use my Batman avatars, so of course I jumped at the chance. Below, is my blog about Batman, kind of. I've always thought that Batman was easier to identify with if you look at the people he chooses to surround himself with. Batman says he works alone, of course, but then again, Batman is the kind of person who goes to fight crime with broken bones, so we don't always have to trust his judgment. :)

I decided to write my blog entry with a specific Batfamily member in mind instead of mainly Bats. I hope you all enjoy it, and don't think less of me for what might be a little of an overshare.

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Condescends to Fix on me a Frown

I’ve always been the kind of person who liked to know the backstory of things: a firm believer that people and situations are a direct product of their history. After all, history gives meaning to things. Without the context of the past, we cannot ascribe value to anything.

When I was small kid, around preschool age, I spent a lot of time hanging out with my teenage uncles. To me, they provided endless sources of amusement. To them, I was a nuisance to be entertained lest I start talking and asking questions. My youngest uncle fondly recalls locking me in a dog cage, just so I would stop following him around. Since I was three-years old then, I thought that it was the Height of Adventure.

I was pretty much one of the loneliest kids you could have ever met.

My mother is a single parent, and she spent of her time working to provide for me. She tried to spend as much as time as possible with me, even though she was putting herself through college, working full-time, and managing our household, but sometimes life got in the way. Not that I noticed, of course, spellbound as I was with the glamour of teenage boys’ rooms, where I got to play a lot of video games on battered Nintendo consoles, play with die-cast mecha, and read a lot of comic books. My mother never really had a problem with this, and just tried to augment the premature pop culture infusion with a great deal of classic literature. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times: it was the time a six-year old could happily imagine that the passengers of the Argo were sort of like the X-Men.

Eventually, I went on to elementary education, which would involve spending whole days at school, and consequently lessening the amount of time I would spend with my uncles. My comic book supply was weaned off, and I ended up falling into the pit of novel reading, as well as the high drama of Japanese animated cartoons. The novels were relatively easy to get, even though bookstores in those days had a great deal less in them, and Amazon.com didn’t exist yet. However, interesting Japanese cartoons, well, you could only get them in the deepest, darkest bowels of Greenhills.

The stores I used to go to, as a wee ten-year old, probably don’t exist anymore. If they do, I hope they’re doing well. As a reward for good grades and boring behavior, I was allowed to go to those stores. My mum would wait outside, and I would go in, dressed in my vinyl the Little Mermaid raincoat so that I could purchase my unsubbed, undubbed, VHS bootlegs of Ranma ½. The owner would wrap my purchases in Chinese newspaper, probably out of habit considering the other, more risqué contents of his store, while I stared in wide-eyed fascination at what I now know is La Blue Girl.

In addition to watching my Japanese animation, I also consumed a great deal of manga, or Japanese sequential art. These were also purchased from the same stores, in the original Japanese, or from newspaper stands in Hong Kong, translated into Chinese. I enjoyed the manga a great deal more than I did the animation of the series, mostly due to the fact that they were almost always a great deal further into the storyline than whatever episode I had watched at the time. In hindsight, I assume that they reminded me of the warm afternoons I used to spend reading X-Men or Superman comic books with my uncles.

Simultaneous with this animaga obsession, I had begun to cultivate and nurture the reader-seed that my mother had been very careful to plant in me. A two-level specialty bookstore opened on Arnaiz Avenue when I was around nine years old, and it was my absolute favorite place in the Philippines, because it was so like Borders and Barnes and Nobles in the States. My mother would drop me off every day in the summer, while she worked in a nearby building, and instruct the security guard to keep me inside the store.

Until this very day, I honestly don’t know why my mother thought I would want to leave the big cold building filled with books, especially since the coffee shop on the second floor always gave me free coffee drinks.

Due to the fact that my reading was largely uncensored, an intentional parenting strategy employed by my mother, I read pretty much everything that looked appealing to me. Whenever I wanted to purchase a book after I’d read it, which was often, very often, I would stand on my tiptoes and inform Jane, at the customer service counter, and she would squirrel them away for me until my mother came back to pick me up. The clerks in the store doted on me, and let me do pretty much anything I wanted as they saw that I was a careful and discerning reader that barely left any marks on the book I read.

It was in this store that I learned what a graphic novel was, by sheer virtue of the fact that the comics I’d read as a younger kid were all bound up and pretty, in the graphic novel section. It was also there that I learned that I had a publishing house preference: while my uncles had largely been the Make Mine Marvel-type, I was inexorably drawn to the DC comics. It helped that Studio 23 showed Batman: the Animated Series in the afternoons, and that my mother had been careful to show me the Tim Burton Batman movies whenever they came out.

In fact, my first real best friend, whose MENSA-member father was the first person I’d met with an Internet connection in the mid to late nineties, became my best friend because of our mutual obsession with the Batman movies. She had a crush on Val Kilmer, the Bruce Wayne of that time, while I desperately adored Batman himself.

Whether he was voiced by Kevin Conroy, played by Michael Keaton (my favorite Batman, and I will fight whoever disagrees), Val Kilmer (boring), George Clooney (the best Bruce Wayne), or a 2D image on a glossy trade paperback, or Adam West, I loved Batman.

And the reason I learned to love Batman, and not just enjoy him as a character, was because of Robin. To be precise, as there are quite a few Robins, it was Timothy Drake that made everything fall into place. One day, I read a back issue of a comic book, I’m not sure if it was one of the many iterations of the New Teen Titans, or if it was a Batman comic in itself, but there was a kid, and he had managed to go all the way to San Francisco to tell Dick Grayson, the original Robin, that Batman needed him.

Now, I was infinitely confused about this of course, because due to my spotty knowledge of the DC canon, Dick Grayson was either Burt Ward, or Chris O’Donnell, and in my head, he wasn’t supposed to be a teenager living with a busty, alien model. He was supposed to be with Batman. At this point in time, I hadn’t known that there had been more than one Robin, and I didn’t know about Jason Todd, the intervening Robin between Dick Grayson and Tim Drake, at all.

But because of that issue, I tried my hardest to dig up as much as I could about this guy, this kid with a fancy camera around his neck, who loved to read, investigate things, and was left mostly to himself by his parents. He was someone smart, someone who was completely separate from his family, a precocious kid who discovered the identity of Batman and two Robins.

As I said earlier I was a lonely child, despite my mother’s best efforts. I didn’t really know that I was lonely at the time, because I’d been trained to never have an empty moment. But here was this kid, who, despite being mostly abandoned by his parents, was so smart, and so awesome, that by himself, he made Batman respect him and want him to be his partner. I have to admit that I wanted this so very, very badly back then. Even now, I kind of hope that the Doctor will come by in his TARDIS, and ask me to go adventuring with him, simply because of who I am, a boring graduate student with very few prospects in life.

It is simple now, to realize that I must have seen myself in him. But to a geeky kid like myself, I just knew that that boy was someone like Asuka Langley Soryuu, Charles Wallace, Eustace Scrubb, or Mona Lisa Figg Newton, someone who made sense in my heart.

When kids are kids, even if they are kids like the kind of child I was, they learn about appropriate human behavior from their family. Other than my mother, pre-pubescent Hope Swann didn’t have much family. I’ve mentioned uncles, I know, but by the time I was that delicate age, my mother and I had begun to draw away from our extended family. So like Tarzan, enamored with the only other human he’d ever seen on his distant island, I aped the people in my books, comics, and animaga.

It’s like learning a word from a book. You know how it’s used in context, how to spell it, and how to conjugate it, but suddenly you say it out loud in public, and you discover that you don’t know how to pronounce it. So, when I got to high school, it was four years of learning how to act like a decent, Filipino human being.

My geekiness was shunted to the side in favor of more academic pursuits such as writing, and Biology. I still watched my anime’, read my manga, and partook of comic books, but the raw stupid jumble of hormones that was adolescence colored everything I experienced with the patina of angst, disappointment, and overwrought drama. Instead of reading superhero comics, I snootily read “graphic novels”, eschewing all mainstream comics for Vertigo and indie imprints, while sneaking in a guilty Young Justice every now and then so I could check on Tim.

It was only in university that I was again able to enjoy superhero comics with absolute sincerity.

The year I entered university, my eighteenth, I met my father for the first time. It was a disappointing experience that was only repeated three more times before the man lapsed completely from my life. Strangely enough, those few meetings were enough to make me feel everything my mother had tried to protect me from when I was growing up. I realized that I had been so terribly lonely, growing up, that the reason I no longer saw my uncles was that we were estranged from them, and all the love my mother had given me through encouraging my geeky and nerdy interests were to compensate for this man’s absence from my life.

It sounds overly dramatic, I know. I mean, I was living a good life, still am. I was luckier than most kids my age. I got to go to a good school, I was reasonably intelligent, and my life had more luxuries than necessary. This is still true now. I can only blame teenage hormones for the drama, I suppose. His minor involvement with me managed to cast a pall over the goodness of my life. Even now, in my darker, more pathetic moments, I have mini-episodes of extreme self-loathing.

A friend of mine recommended that I read Runaways, and Young Avengers, promising to me that despite being superhero comics, they were well-written, and incisive. So, one day, in my sophomore year of being an underachieving Biology major, I sat in the mall branch of the specialty bookstore that I had once loved, and blazed through them. Both those series dragged me back into the superhero genre. It was then that I remembered another teen hero: Tim Drake, and desperately wanted to know what happened to him.

Oddly enough, I was now older than Tim Drake. He was still Robin to Batman, and he was still absolutely amazing. He wasn’t the same little boy who’d snuck out on his housekeeper anymore, of course, and he was leading his own team just like Batman, and the first Robin did. Batman trusted him, as much as someone like Batman can trust anyone, and except for a few bumps here and there, Batman considered Tim worthy in ways that I hungered for, as a young woman in her late teens.

I suppose it would sound shallow to some, hell, to all who read this, but I derived some comfort from my reading of Batman, as a sort of perfect-father surrogate. A lot of people may call his parenting into question, but to me, as a reader, he has done more for me emotionally than my father ever will. Conversely, when I read the issues when Stephanie Brown was either a) rejected from being a vigilante, b) became, and then got fired from being Robin, c) died, and d) became Batgirl, I was in a glass case of emotion for months.

I bought as many comics and back issues as I could just so I could catch up, and I supplemented my meager purchases by crossing the street to the college adjacent to my university, and using their library to read up on Batman and Robin.

One day, I met a great person in the local Starbucks who saw me reading comics, and he lent me Identity Crisis, which I read in the space of thirty minutes, and then promptly spent hours bending the ears of my friends about. A lot of people don’t like Identity Crisis much, and consider it the Beginning of the End. However, I look fondly on it, because of the emotional weight I’d felt when reading what happened to Tim Drake’s father. Reader, I admit I did tear up a bit when I saw that panel of Batman just hugging Tim.

That same friend brought me to what would become my LCS, or local comic shop. It was in that store in Magallanes, that I spent my time going back and forth between my undergraduate thesis, and familiarizing myself with the DCU canon. As I spent my evenings feeding and cleaning hundreds of mice, I listened to The Sporting Life by the Decemberists and thought of Tim Drake to get me through it.

It is patently obvious that the entire Batfamily, from Bats himself, all the way to the littlest and latest Robin, Damian Wayne, has gigantic family issues. In fact, other than Commissioner Gordon, Steph’s mum, and Kate Kane’s surprisingly supportive dad, the rest have parents who have died, and those who aren’t some manner of orphan, have parents that are villainous and abusive.

These characters’ lives could fuel a whole slew of Newberry Award-winning novels. Until now, despite a retcon-resurrection, I still weep for tiny Jason Todd.

Now that I am older, everything sounds really ridiculous. Especially all the way over here, at the end of this blog entry. I am not the sad, young girl who pines over the father she barely knew, anymore. If ever I were channeling a younger version of myself, it would probably be the bright, inquisitive kid who couldn’t keep her hands off a book if it killed her.

But really, the time of being a kid is kind of over. I’m twenty-five, a graduate student wrestling with her thesis, and mostly in charge of my emotions. My mother and I are still very close, and she is still very supportive of me and all my nerdy endeavors and geeky interests.

And while I still love Tim Drake, precious kid that he is, I think I relate more with Kate Kane, Batwoman. After all, even Dick Grayson, the first Robin, as I mentioned earlier, had to be Nightwing eventually.

This morning, I was on Tumblr, adding posts to my queue when a message from Bessi popped into my inbox.

Now I've never mentioned Bessi, or any of the hundred or so new people who've entered my life in the past six months, on this journal. So you'll just have to bear with me, and nod understandingly, wherever you are.

Ah, yes, Bessi, of course, go on.

Anyway, Bessi informed me that my tagging system on Tumblr (non-existent; I just keep the old tags from whatever post I'm reblogging because I think they're funny) is completely horrible. It was ending Western Civilization. Cliffs were falling into the sea because things aren't making sense!

The thing is, I really don't care much for my Tumblr. I mean, my face is on it, and it's the first thing I check online when I wake up, and the last at night, but the thing is, I've always kind of thought of it as divorced from me. I've always just thought of it as a place to find and stash interesting shit. I've never really thought of it as an online journal; something representative of me.

It isn't Livejournal. Or Twitter.

Anyway (x2 combo), I started going through my older posts on Tumblr, in the hopes of making a tagging system, all the way back in 2008. I'd forgotten that I used to cross-post my LJ entries to it, so it was kind of a pleasant surprise to see little snippets of my blogging. I used to blog a fucking lot, just like the rest of the people in my college barkada. I know for sure that most of them don't blog at all now. The ones who still do have migrated to other sites similar to Livejournal, or succumbed to microblogging sites like Twitter and Tumblr, or the social web of likes that is Facebook.

I suppose my interest in blogging waned when everyone just up and disappeared. I make it sound so sudden though, when really, it was a gradual thing.

I miss blogging. I miss writing things out at the end of the day.

I'm not sure if it's because blogging is tied up with so many good memories and experiences, or maybe, as I told ate Kam, I just want to write something and finish it, even if it's a silly little journal entry.

It's a little late for New Year's Resolutions, I think.

But I resolve to blog more, starting today.

I'm going to write the dumbest things. I'm totally out of practice. I'm not even sure if this entry makes any sense. Big fucking oh well! :D

I guess it'll come back with practice.

Tonight! I got to use a fire extinguisher on this little electrical fire.

Usually, after I wash the dishes and clean the kitchen, I have to go out and feed the dogs and clean them. But I was a bit delayed after cleaning the kitchen because the sliding door wouldn't lock.

And then I heard a pop! from outside and when I turned to look, there were for real flames being projected on our living room curtains! Like in the forest, during Bambi, or so I thought dizzily! Haha, the mosquito killing thing that usually hangs outside of the dog house gave up the ghost in a truly flamboyant way: by bursting into fire and dramatically collapsing into a burning heap of I GIVE UP. XD It was pretty dramatic! The fire came up to my waist, and it was pretty spread out because the parts kind of exploded outwards when the thing fell.

Thankfully, we have electrical-fire fire extinguishers located all over the house. Unfortunately, the one nearest the dogs was wrapped up in plastic and taped up... to protect it? IDK, but never again. Thankfully, I was wearing my metal hair-stick so I pretty much slashed that sucker open and got to go outside and save my poor dogs from asphyxiation. God damn!

It was pretty cool using the extinguisher! I was like all, legs planted firmly, and spraying the foam from side to side as per instructions. Kept my cool, and the dogs were pretty calm too (or terrified, the poor things).

Mum came down, and nearly had an asthma attack. :( But she turned off the electricity so that I could examine the socket and stuff.

Dogs are fed, and calm. Mum is kind of still rattled. I'm kind of... on an adrenaline high?

Haha, XP points.

Dear Yuletide Author,

I would like to start off by saying THANK YOU for writing me a story! Yay! ♥ I really do appreciate it.

( fandoms )

( few deets about me )

Welp, that's pretty much it, Yuletide Author.

Thank you, again!

Sincerely,
♥ coffeebased

mininano update for the interested:


Still on target, but wow, the words aren't flowing as freely as I'd hoped. Here's hoping that the rest of the month will be better. 500 words a day.

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Seeing my adviser tomorrow morning to discuss thesis proposal draft. I'm going to be enrolling in proposal defense as well, if things are all right, as I hope they are.

Boring boring boring.

514 / 15000 words. 3% done!

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So, it's November, a.k.a. the month where, instead of pecking at her keyboard and then leaving her writing to go off and be useless, Hope actually sits down everyday and writes something.

This is my third (Just checked the comm, and surprised myself! I didn't even remember that I'd joined in 2008!) fourth year of joining mini_nanowrimo: "a community for people not really up for the NaNoWriMo challenge but who still want to set and meet writing goals". This year, I pledged 500 words per day, which, I'm sure, is a sissy amount of words to pledge to other people, but I swear that that's a lot for a useless person like me.

I'm dedicating all of this year's words to Alon, my poor unfinished story. I started her in 2007, wrote 20T words in a blind month and a half, and then ignored her for the better part of three years, wrote a little more, and then forgot about her for the whole year I was working at the Picture Company, and then picked her up again a couple months back and wrote another 20T words, and ramble, ramble, forgot her again until... NOW.

I'm horrible. And rambly. I may have had too much coffee in the hope that it would help me write.

I'm hoping to hammer out a great deal of her this month, and somehow, get into the habit of writing everyday so that I can finish her already.

Yeah. So, here's hoping.

edited to change icon :D

I really tried to go to sleep early tonight.

Unfortunately, the room was so cold that it woke me up. Or rather, a sneeze woke me up. Needless to say, I've raised the thermostat, and lowered the fan speed.

I hate being sick.

This really doesn't set me apart from anyone. I mean, sane people don't enjoy being sick. I don't have Munchausen's, although, wow, that would be awkward.

Anyway, I hate being sick. There is nothing rewarding about being sick. Not only does your body get weak, but your mind gets distracted by all the little body pains that it makes mistakes. It would be really cool if I were the type of person who only gets a cold for a day, who's never gotten hospitalized, who never gets a fever with a little drizzle. I hate being weak.

I hate things that make me weak. I hate liabilities. I hate caring about being weak.

Man, I'm really whiny.

I should really focus on getting better, on thesis, on writing, and being a good adult.

I don't know whats gotten into me.

Priorities, Swann.

I don't exactly remember how old I was, but I know that I was definitely more than nine years old, and probably younger than twelve. It happened between Things, between Big Things, and to be completely honest, everything in between is just one big, soupy, mess.

So, yeah, I was young.

It's not a complex story.

A girl in my class was showing off a tiny piece of embroidery. I think it was two-by-four inches, and the picture was of some roses, or some birds, or some leaves. Something natural, and beautiful, something fine, and fair.

She wasn't my friend, and the girls admiring her stitching weren't my friends either. I wouldn't go so far as to call them my enemies; who has enemies when they're between nine and twelve years old? No one, not me.

They called me over because they noticed me looking. We were all standing, waiting for the teacher to gather our group from the home economics room. I was standing alone, and my book was boring me. I don't remember what book it was, but I know that it was heavy, and that its pages were small, effortful things.

I went over to their little group, and she said, Look, isn't it beautiful?

It's pretty, I conceded as I looked at the flowers-birds-leaves, But may I see the back of the cloth?

She was confused, but she obliged.

The back of the cloth was hideous: tangled, ruined, ugly, disgustingly done.

So I said, My embroidery tutor says that the front doesn't matter if the back is messy.

I was proud that I had remembered this. My embroidery tutor was quite strict, and she wasn't very patient with the way I pulled my stitches too tightly. I warped the cloth all the time, and I often tangled the thread with itself, round and round, until I had no choice but to cut it, and start over. I started over all the time. I made mistakes all the time. When I was that age, all my tutors were teaching me that my mistakes were natural, that it was better that I knew what mistakes I was making so that I wouldn't embarrass myself the way I always did.

But my classmate was hurt, and said, What's the point of having the back all neat when the front looks pretty?

Or something like that. It was Between Big Things. I can't be bothered to remember everything so exactly. Ask me about yesterday and the oranges, the other week, and her knees, last year and the feeling of his stubble on my cheek, and I can give a better description. The oranges were tart, her knees were singularly beautiful, my skin burns when I see him walk by.

And because I was a horrible brat, now I am a bitch, I said that, If the back is neat, the front follows.

Then I left, and I continued to read my boring book. I don't think that I've ever spoken to those girls again, least of all the girl whose embroidery I disliked so strongly.

That is the end of my story.

It's a dumb story.