my friend, the one who dissed my tupac post, has softened. somehow.
this after he read about the post about my mother'’s man troubles. but not as much.
but this is not about you, he emailed me again. what about me? i im’'ed him. you and the true things in life. you and love, he im’'ed back.
now this why it never pays as much to befriend a fellow writer. especially one who makes a living at writing soaps.
but somehow, i am baffled by the flurry of all this. he is a dear friend and maybe this is why i sort of feel shamed questioning this implicit assumption thrust upon me. the fact that he writes for a top rating soap in manila somehow gives him the mantle of infallibility as to matters of things true and beautiful. of love.
so, i emailed another friend, not a mutual one. and he wasn’'t kind at all with my soap writer friend.
what does he know? this catty friend wrote back. he churns out escapist fares.
but our people just love them, i emailed him back. he must have tapped into something primordial, something original and thus true in the hearts of the viewers.
my bitchy friend has yet to email me back. he is not into this, the minutiae of what he disdainfully call the writing life. he writes zippy copies for an ad agency.
what are the true things in my life then?
i am stunned by this question. honestly, i don’t know that this is a valid question i can ask myself.
i always believe that even my lies, my prevarications, my facades, they are real, they are true to me. and to force me to winnow my life choices into my friend’'s fascistic binary catalog - the true and the untrue - well, it seems nothing but phony to me.
and so i decided to watch on the filipino channel the soap that he writes for. and just ten minutes into it, i was reminded quite rudely why i was never into pinoy soaps. well, soap for that matter.
drippy lines. hokier music that wells up almost every time a character looks straight into a camera. nothing comes as true to me.
i flipped back to my basic american cable. nothing much in there, either.
so i settled for this nature show, the kind that public television affiliates cram into their after school hours programming.
the presenter, one in ill fitting bush jacket, was really wired over what he raved as a 150-year old scientific breakthrough.
it all started 150 years ago when the great evolutionist charles darwin was presented with this strange looking orchid from the isolated island of madagascar. the orchid had a twelve inch nectar spur.
confounding his fellow scientists, darwin boldly predicted then that for this unusual flower to exist and thrive, somewhere in madagascar there must also be a moth with a 12 inch long proboscis.
this made his colleagues snort. no such thing. and for the next 150 years, no enterprising scientist has ever found any evidence as to this moth with an elephantine tongue necessary for the pollination of this strange flower.
not until last year when a scientist from new orleans brought with him to the island an infrared night vision camera and captured in action that never before beheld freak moth.
i couldn’'t wait for the show to get over. as i was filled with things to write, more melodramatic, more maudlin, i don’t care, that my soap writer friend could ever think of.
this is how i planned on starting my new letter to him: you’'re asking me to write about the true things in my life? about love?
here is my truth. i am a strange orchid with a very long nectar spur. and even if somehow i have the hardest time believing it myself, i kind of feel there is a moth out there that has a very long tongue. and i can, no, i will wait for it. patiently.