It’s Thursday, like 02:00 in the morning, and I should be leaving sometime in the afternoon. My sis will have a teacher come in to teach I guess (lol), and she’s been workin’ on her world history work and sorts.

My parents are taking me down to San Diego. I would have been just find taking the Greyhound again, although I know it would take me about 12 hours from Salinas all the way down.

So, yeah, I’m one of the few people that hasn’t learned how to drive, so lay off ‘cause I get that a whole lot. I’m workin’ on it, but it’s comin’ by slowly, so just lay off! Wouldn’t believe how many people ask me the same ol’ thing and so yeah, I know, I know. I really want to get around and it’s easier to do stuff, ya know? Yeah, for those of you that can, so yeah, you know how it is.

I actually finished reading two books this past week I’ve been home. One of them is called The Singalong Tribe by Kent Ashford, which the setting is in the Philippines and I’d talk about it more later. It’s actually my first fiction that took place in the Philippines. I read Domestica by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, but that’s for my ethnic studies class. I actually didn’t have too much trouble reading it even though it was a “required reading” that I technically feel less motivated to read. Hopefully reading it gets me a little ahead in the game for the class ‘cause I need all the extra time I could spare for the quarter.

Another book I’m reading is Flippin’ Filipinos on America, which is a big collection of stories and poems by Filipinos (edited by Luis H. Francia and Eric Gamalinda). Right now, I’ve read a few stories, and I’m really into it. I mean, for a few of the stories I read, I felt for the characters and tuned into their feelings and I don’t know, just feeling it.

The books I tend to like are those about people. I think I like narratives, or actually anything that really gets into characters and their internal workings. I mean, it’s just so fascinating how the details in the words could get you to feel or at least imagine what somebody is going through. There’s only so much movies could do, like they give you the visual and audio senses of what’s going on and you are basically a spectator. But when you read, you actually are given an opportunity to engage in the reading and because you have to imagine much of what’s happening, you feel it more. With a movie, when something happens, I’d still be there sitting (maybe react to where I sit), but to a reading, it might be so intense that I have to pause and put the book down ‘cause I felt it. It’s kinda hard to describe such an unreal sensation.

The combination of real and fantasy might ignite an imagination that neither realism nor fantasy can create on its own. The experiences and feelings of real life with the details of a fiction make one partly identify, but also to stretch from what is in one to what can be to another, a world not of one’s making, but molded to be interpreted beyond the realism of oneself to a fantasy. The fantasy draws on the reality to make real the unreal in the mind, to bind the real life feelings and fantasies and intertwine the story as if one can live it, too. The reality draws on the fantasy to incite what the reality cannot conceive to make possible also to make the unreal real. It’s almost as if one can be empathically linked to the story, to the characters. This is what an ideal story would entail for me.