Posts filed under ‘500-1000 word feat’
Smart Buying
Most women, if not all, look for shoes which are comfy, can be worn with any clothes and cheap. Practical women, I know, do. I do, too. But sometimes, just looking at shelves of shoes overwhelms me that buying just a pair is like a deprivation for my well-being. The extravagance I can’t afford for a new cell phone is corrected in my covetous desire for shoes.
I am not your big time Imelda shoe addict, no. But I think, I will be someday, if given a financial breather which I hope will come to me. But, in anyway, this shoe business has taken a toll on my financial capabilities. There was a time when I found myself eating noodles and potatoes while staring on a new shoe box beside me.
My latest indulgences were a pair of platforms and pointy flats. The former, I fondly call as my Minnie Mouse shoes, was one of the disappointments I have had in search of those quintessential shoe/footwear/foot covering or whatever you call it.
After I ate my dinner of noodles and potatoes, I placed the shoe box on my lap and removed its lid. The moment I laid eyes on them on the shelves, I knew I am going to buy them. Ah! My Minnie Mouse Shoes. I told myself silently, praying in the depths of my brain that it is going to be a good buy.
I took the shoes from the box, admired, no, praised, no, exalted its glossy material—the round toe, one-and-a-half-inch-tall-heel, the red and white stripes padding, and the signature brand. Another factor which led me to buy the shoes was the footwear name. Famous actresses have endorsed and worn the shoes. They looked good; and I thought, why not buy one for me, too. And there I was, cueing to the next cashier for my Minnie Mouse shoes.
I was still in awe with the shoes that wearing it seemed like a sacrilege. It was too much for me—I had to slip on my feet slowly, not allowing myself to breathe as the pair fitted on my feet perfectly. I could almost imagine those moments I have had with trying shoes on, looking for that perfect pair in the same way when Cinderella’s Prince Charming had to look for the rightful owner of the glass slipper. Every good moments I have had crashed into me, a whirlwind of chocolate-strawberry-jelly-mallows-syrup of good things made into one. Wow.
I stood up, holding the edge of the chair I was sitting on at home. Do Hollywood actresses feel like this when they received their first Oscars?
Then, I tried to walk in them. And all too suddenly: crickcrack!
I can hear Howie Days’ Collide in the background: “even the best fall out sometime…”
And it was just that…all the glories I had in mind suddenly crumbled in front of me. I can’t take back my money or the time I had used up cueing in to the cashier.
Still, even if I cannot return nor exchange my Minnie Mouse shoes with another pair, that picture perfect moment I have had while trying them on makes my smart buying experience STILL a good one if not the best.
Add comment January 20, 2009
Teaching Memesis
Much of what has been considered the ground and pillar of literature are copies and reproductions of other forerunners of the same kind. The story lines, the plots and even the events and scenes are not as original as readers would have thought. After all, everything has been written under the sun. T. S. Eliot taught once that [literature] should root from tradition. He advised writers that before finding themselves among the big ones in the Western canon, one should aspire to follow the tradition first. Even Gemino Abad encouraged this ideology in his native clearing.
The tradition, being an umbrella concept, provided the means that literature should have its model—an archetype. Shakespeare was one of the famous writers, although already a part of the tradition, who wrote his plays and tragedies after other plays and tragedies before him. King Lear and Comedy of Errors are among the few of his reproduction of plays. King Lear was after the great legend and poem of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia; while it was from Menaechmi of Roman dramatist Plautus where Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors was loosely based.
Another of Shakespeare’s tragedies is his Hamlet which was taken after Euripides’ Orestes. The latter provided an archetype for one of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy. Shakespeare took much of the plot from the latter while at the same time weaving in his artistic license—that even if another writer copies another’s work, there is still artistry from the other writer that is technically his.
So, what made Hamlet a copy and at the same an original play of its own?
Though the plot was not originally his, Shakespeare placed his artistry in the fact that he recontextualized the play according to the milieu of his time. In the warring time in Denmark, Hamlet came back to his country not because of a threat from the invaders, but because of his father’s death. Like Orestes, Hamlet’s father was murdered by Claudius, who was his uncle. Suspecting of his uncle’s involvement, together with his mother, Queen Gertrude, in the killing of his father, Hamlet drew out his plan to prove of Claudius’ guilt.
But unlike Orestes, Hamlet has no sister to share the burden and avenge his father’s death. He carried the burden by himself, made schemes to spell justice as he knows it. Also, the archetype had its leaning on the Greek tradition of consulting the oracle. This belief in a being beyond the physical world was reflected through the Oracle in Delphi and the ghost of the King of Denmark. The latter, however, connotes an evil spirit lurking all throughout the play.
Shakespeare placed his artistry on the tragedy by providing a complex character, a larger than life persona who was driven alone by revenge and a twisted sense of justice. This credit due for Shakespeare is the fact that despite the archetype(s), he came up with his original characterization of a copied character—not fully hinging on his tragedies’ revelation on the mythological Orestes.
References:
“Orestes.” Microsoft® Encarta® 2007 [DVD]. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2006.
Add comment January 20, 2009
A Rose for the Griersons
“Then we knew that this was to be expected too; as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman’s life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to die.”
—A Rose for Emily
Even after years had passed, the townspeople of Jefferson were still in awe to the last of the Southerner’s rich: Miss Emily Grierson. These people went, buried and prayed for the soul of Emily. Yet, they were also the same people who talked behind their hands about the plight of the remaining Grierson. They would endlessly question who Emily Grierson is and what had really happened to her.
Subtly, Faulkner’s townspeople also talked about the man who was responsible for Ms. Grierson’s demise—her father. Looking through the former’s actions, it was actually the father whom these people were talking about. They complained and found fault with the woman but what they were really implying was the man whose absence was made present by the daughter. It was the father whom the townspeople were trying to pass judgment on, not Emily. After all, what Emily had become was the result of the patriarch’s action on his daughter.
Reading closely on the characters, Emily Grierson was led forth by her father to act as an aristocrat while at the same time subverting her femininity. The father wanted Emily to belike him. Emily’s father perpetuated an idea on his daughter that she is a woman of the aristocrat and yet this also made her someone who neither had the capacity to act on her own but through her father’s approval. Emily, therefore, was in the perpetual dominance of her father even after his death.
When Emily had the chance to free herself from her father, she remained otherwise by picking a man who was not from her circle. Homer Barron, a Yankee day laborer, became the closest object of Emily’s politics of power over another being. She dressed him, made him perfect for her, a reflection on how her father also made her perfect for him. Then again, Homer Barron, though a Yankee laborer, had expressed—“remarked—he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks Club–that he was not a marrying man.” And somehow, this made Emily act virulently in the same fashion which her father thwarted her life. She bought Arsenic. Years later, the townspeople discovered the man in his “profound and fleshless grin.”
The Negro man will always be a slave and Emily had thought better by leaving him to his fate. This was evident as she never acted upon him in the same way she did on Homer Barron and on her father.
The death of the two men also signified Emily’s death. When she had no one to exert her power on, Emily Grierson found herself waiting for the same fate her father and Homer Barron succumbed into. This is the ultimate culmination of Emily’s father’s influence on her—death, therefore, becomes the solution, and an only one, for Emily to free herself.
The townspeople, in the end, will always wonder about the kind of man and woman these Griersons think they were in the town of Jefferson.
Add comment January 20, 2009
The Holiday
All my life, I have spent Christmas with my family. From prep school, I helped prepare the table. Elementary, I decorated the Christmas tree. High school, I planned the motif and decoration at home. College, I lit up my first firecracker: a sparkler. As an employee—nada.
Yup. My 2008 Christmas was not as significant as I would have wanted it to be. I spent it with another loved one (yeah, yeah), prepared a dish for the Noche Buena, gave gifts to friends, attended the company’s Christmas party, all the bustles but a firecracker to light up the night sky.
Davao City is known to ban firecrackers on holidays like this. For a Davaoeño, this spells safety and a challenge for his or her ingenuity. A friend who has been living here in Davao for some time once told me that indeed, the celebration for Christmas in the city is not your usual firecracker spree. Neither it is your typical holiday where people look up the sky and await for the black canvas of clouds shift colors: a sparkling green sky; fiery red; glowing yellow and even a constellation of sounds and colors mixed together by the gods of that night. It is not the same as the one we have had in our provinces.
And I had my share of this Christmas.
After attending the party of the company where I worked from, my loved one ushered me in his kitchen to prepare for the dish I wanted to have that night. I was excited, really excited, because this will be my first Christmas in Davao, first Christmas with him, first Christmas away from my family. While mixing the ground meat, the flour and egg, I was also busy throwing questions at him:
What time do we go to church? Will it rain? Do we have enough ground meat? Are we buying lechon manok? How about firecrackers? A sparkler, perhaps?
He stopped in mid air, his arm akimbo, a can opener suspended atop a canned pineapple chunks he was trying to open. So did I. It was like I had asked him the most ridiculous question in my whole life!
“Wala ui! Galawgaw! (There’s none! Oh, damn!)” And he shook his head, went on opening the can. “Bawal man na diri. (That is prohibited here.)” He continued, still talking about the firecracker.
“I know,” I said, “But, is it possible to have one? Even just a sparkler?” I looked at him, stopping altogether what I was set to do.
“Hell,no!” He scratched his head and laughed out loud.
“But…”
He moved behind me, wrapped his arms on my waist and said, “We can have music. We can play. Maybe Jack*[1] will be here like last year. But, we can’t have any firecrackers.”
I looked at him helplessly.
It was a winless case, at least for me. That was the first Christmas where I heard no firecrackers as people counted down the minute towards December 25. The food was good, the company was even great. But, I was looking for that firecracker showdown to remind me that I am still that child who would look up the sky during this time. I longed for that firecracker moment where my friends, my siblings, and my parents would go outside our house; greet everyone a Merry Christmas while I looked at them through the flicker of fire—wishing that holidays should be spent like this.
[1] Not his friend’s real name
Add comment January 20, 2009
