Setting up my blog, Sounds of Silk

After much delay (and month-on-month prodding from Sorsi, Marc and Abe), decided to buckle down to putting myself out there and staking a claim on my own blog.

A lot of friends of mine have been blogging for quite some time (as in a loong time) and I've been wondering if my weird phobia for being unable to take back things that have escaped my lips has long been an unfounded one.

Why "Sounds of Silk?" It came from a line in a piece I'd written for a boy (or should a say 'after a boy').

It was my first attempt at a non-sappy love poem meant to be read/cursed to high heavens out loud--and of course, as my freshman English prof would say, was populated with the sensual s's, sibilant sounds.

My friends Marvi and roomie Ana, at the UP Workshop in Baguio, will forever hold a place in my heart defending that line that the panelists had picked and peel apart. Of course being award-winning writers, you just had to defer to their collective power to absorb whole libraries and quote Margaret Atwood AND break it down over San Mig Light and karoke. "Silk..it rustles, right. What's sensual about that?"

It being the typical workshop format, the maker of the piece, just had to take both butchery and praise. Fists clenched, white-knuckled, grasping the wicker seats to keep from jumping up and screaming (like someone I knew had done at a workshop) or sniffling/saying "Eh, gusto ko kasi yung tunog."

Eh, I had the my reasons:

First, I really liked the sound of that line.

Second, I really really liked the sound I imagined from that line.

Third, in my limited encounters with silk fabric, that sound was what I wanted someone reading it sana were to hear--both as he read the line and as he heard his voice echo back to him.

So no matter what anyone said, I was keeping it in.

Back to this blog. So what will this blog be about? I don't know exactly yet. Marc suggested a "book mistress" kind of blog.

In my head: "Ano, mistress daw?" As in "whopak" *cracks the whip? As in the same images of mayhem and frolic as Sorsi's S&M Garfield picture? Kaya ko ba iyon, hehe. Maybe not quite that.

If I were to take a crack at it, I realize it can be about what I love when I'm not crunching numbers---the environment, friends, heart song, words. Words and sounds of words, and tangentially, the sounds from other instruments human beings play--rock fan that I am.

And maybe all the other laments and lurid and luscious and glorious things people make with their hands and voices. You know, the things in my head that sound of silk.