Escape through French

I am so glad to have found my blog again. I miss writing on it for months. My mind has been shifting from life on earth and the afterlife where my mother has gone, and my stepfather too. It's emotionally draining and sometimes or most of the time I have to contain myself so as not to feel depressed the whole day.

What is the importance of blogging in my country the Philippiens? It is a space for release of our angst over rising prices of rice, over kotongan of police from Recto to Divisoria; celfone calls that drop or get cut off because the person I am calling up is a community leader in Smokey Mountain, and that would mean a "subversive" activity, etc. etc.

Is there a perfect country Folks? It is true people say everywhere there are problems. So what do I do now? I am learning how to speak and write French by myself. I've got three books -- one for lessons; another for verb conjugation and third, a dic. wow, every morning and before retiring I look them up. I have even written some quotations for me to remember and read while lying on my bed like Comment da nouveau or what's new, and Quel dommage or what a pity. Do you know that i could also compose a sentence like Je ne vous saime. Now guess what that means. Of course you must have heard of that cuss word which begins with M, which I use for asking a friend in absencia, Combien epause? Une, deux, trois, quatre, MMMMMM.

When I go to my French lessons, I cannot help but remember the Fall of Bastille. Memories of my trip to Paris, France way back in 1981 come rushing, when I spent the 14th of July there. On that day, I wanted to drink a bottle of beer in a restaurant fronting the sculpture of the Bastille in the city. But a bottle cost more if drank there about 14 francs, whereas drank outside it would only cost 9 francs. What did I do? Guess. Well I bought one and then sat by a bench beside the sculpture and drank it to my heart's content, remembering Victor Hugo's Les Miserables and the Jean Paul Marat in the Persecution and Assassination of Jean Paul Marat as performed by the Inmates of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, a play by Peter Brooks. Then I also remembered Claude Debussy and Claire de la Lune and La Mer.

Images of Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet and Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir parade in my mind. Feminisme Francaise. How many other intellectuals do I feel happy about remembering?

But as my mind went back to the Philippines then, which was under martial law, the perpetual rule of the Marcoses, I felt depressed again. But did not feel that so much because beer has a way of easing up the nerves. And so I laughed and laughed for my presence then in Europe and having that freedom to experience thinking, speaking and writing freely in the democratic continent, albeit half aristocratic in culture.

Vive Le France! Vive les Philippines!