A One-font story
Actually, there is no story. It’s just a title. My friend Mike and I were talking about lay-outs and kerning and fonts and character spacing, and I thought ‘one-font story’ sounds like a cool title for something.
Anyways.
There are so many things to write about and I don’t know where to begin! I hoard ideas for stories the way some species of rodents hoard nuts (Chip and Dale and their walnut capers versus Donald Duck come readily to mind); but it’s hard to write because they, the stories, can be construed as barely disguised tales about myself and the people I am friends with, the people I share my daily travels in politics with. Sayang.
But I do have such interesting friends!
Take Mike, for instance (forgive me, pare). I want to describe the way he tilts his head when asking a question, just so, a little to the left, and follows it up with a remark that sends whoever it is he’s talking to either laugh or be scandalized. He is a music fiend and he takes such an interest in quirky things, common things made unusual because of the fragility and importance they are treated with by those who appreciate them. He is a fan of Neil Gaiman and of Bob Dylan. He wears black Converses and he slouches like Frankenstein’s monster, and though 31, he looks 25 and acts 15. He carries his passions easily, but he has a deep well of sympathy for concepts and ideas that run deep (the movement, fatherhood, death and how it should never go hand-in-hand with youth). He doesn’t smoke, he has a twisted sense of humor, and he likes blueberry shake.
Or my friend Tonyo, neat freak extraordinaire, nicotine addict, closet mushy person. When he walks, it is as if he is expecting someone to block his path and he is prepared to use force if necessary to remove the obstacle. His grief is often unexpressed because he is always swift to use the past tense. Acceptance and forgetting seem to be his watchwords.
I like describing people.It’s a good way to warm yourself up before you embark on the journey through the hole in the paper.
I would like to describe the man I married, and for my description to be unmushy and objective. I tell him it’s nothing personal– I’m just practicing my skills at description, at narration, at characterization. But for all these explanations, he still gets a little queasy, disturbed. An intensely private person, my husband; ironic really, considering how public he lives his life as a professor and adviser of student groups. He takes such a warm and sincere interest in the welfare of his students and co-faculty. He loves to read — science fiction in particularly. This is not surprising given his math and science background, and he wishes he had time to write his own SF stories set in a mala-kolonyal at mala-pyudal na lipunan.
When my husband laughs, his eyes turns into little chinks, and his entire body is carried along with the rythm of his laugh. It sounds a little like Ernie’s laugh — Ernie of Sesame Street. Like a little boy tickled pink; or a man remembering something from his childhood and he laughs from the memory of something that once made him amazed, wide-eyed.
will continue this later
