happy morning

Sitting here, eating my giant corn muffin, newly shampooed while my french manicure slowly chips away, I'm ready to take on the world.

How do I describe this place? It's where I spend 8 hours of my day, running about from one division to another, or else I'm behind my desk, writing and editing and chewing on raisins and/or Pantoja cheese bread.

Our room is shaped like a sword, and I am where the handle is. There's a long table in the middle, and each editor is lucky enough to have her own spacious cubicle. It's not as clean as an obsessive-compulsive like me would like it to be, but it's not that bad: the books are arranged according to the date they were published, papers are filed properly, and the floor is swept clean everyday.

In my little corner, I've a cabinet full of the things I can't live without: raisins, whole wheat bread, tissue paper, hygiene essentials (toothbrush, toothpaste, face wash, lotion, powder, body glitter, lavender oil ...), sanitary pads, and a six pack of fiber-enriched pineapple juice, some cans of Coke Light. Yoda, all 4 inches of him, guards the cans with his light saber. Shrink-wrapped and ready for action, he'd come with a Jollibee happy meal I'd gotten for my brother some weeks ago. I haven't had time to personalize my table, but I plan to use it to display some of the candles from my collection, a pretty Dresden doll my last boyfriend had given me, and four pictures of the sea that I'd taken in Ilocos Sur, Dumaguete, Bohol and California. I'd like to hang up movie posters on the dividers - Casablanca, Lost In Translation, La Dolce Vita, The Muppets: The Movie. Miss Piggy cavorts with Marcello Mastrianni, just as she should.

Oh, the sea. I've been on land for months and still I feel like I'm in water.

Right now, I'm sitting across from Rebecca Anonuevo, one of our poet-authors. She's checking her third collection of poems, Saulado: Sa Gilid Ng Gunita, which will be released along with 30 other titles during our September 2005 launch. I was one of two editors who helped finalize her book: it was written in Filipino, a language I am shamefully inept at, so most of her metaphors just flew over my head. But I know enough to understand that she writes about memory, the cycles of forgetting and remembrance, how we remember things much differently from what had actually happened, from a place of hindsight and healing.

She's the head of the Filipino department at La Salle University, but you'd never know it by the way she acted or dressed. Today she's wearing a simple peasant blouse, and her usual tortoiseshell rimmed glases. She's looking at her poems lovingly, even caressing the pages every now and then: I'm excited na, she giggles like a little girl, though she's almost 40, my fifth baby. She has two young boys, whom she brings with her sometimes, and they're as dark-skinned and quietly astute as their mother.

I'll be like her someday, I think, only with more stylish outfits and well-manicured nails.

For now, I'm off to lunch.