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Jose saw the handwriting on the notecards and thought it was a computer font; I’m so proud. Click on the photos to read the next seven cards.

One problem that comes up when making copies by hand is how to keep the book open to the right page. Breaking the spine is not an option. I used to weigh down the books with other books, or with a cat if she was being cooperative. Fortunately someone has invented this.

A book holder! How it works:

You tuck a few pages under each arm. The paper gets creased a little, but it’s smoothed out easily enough. I found this book holder at National Bookstore, P174.75.

Also I’ve discovered that posture matters in handwriting. Not only does good posture keep your neck from aching when you’re writing, but the script just looks more elegant.

As long as we’re talking about our houses, I finally picked up my wooden trunk and put my notebooks in it.

I used to spend too much on leather-bound journals with thick paper. Then I realized that they were too heavy, and that they were were too beautiful for what was written in them. So I switched to Moleskines.

My cats love the baul and take turns lying on it. We call it the Hornburg.

Noel Orosa’s place is where we go to eat chocolate, drink limoncello, and engage in obsessive behavior such as listening to fifty versions of Honeysuckle Rose, at least half of them by Sarah Vaughan, and analyzing the differences.

The decorative style is a variant on shabby chic which I call “Jackie O meets Big and Little Edie Beale in the Hamptons, minus cats and squirrels.” Noel himself developed it by reading every single book and website on designing for small spaces, and executed it with the help of his fabulous interior decorator Leah Sanchez. After seeing the photos on Noel’s Facebook page, some designers and media persons have asked to view the place.

The total area is 51 square meters but it feels roomier. Instead of breaking up the space with walls or dividers, Noel used glass partitions. Sandwiched between the glass panels are very old postcards, photographs, and letters written by his great-aunts.

“In his last three or four years, Lolo lived in our house,” Noel says. “He left behind his personal effects including this set of postcards from 1910-20, letters, and pictures. I asked my Dad for them because I find most things old, abused, and worn-out strangely beautiful. For years, I considered just framing them and hanging them on the wall. Then I had a eureka moment: they would make perfect dividers if placed between glass panels.

“This one idea dictated the theme for the rest of the house: why not make a family museum?”

The glass-topped table is a museum of old election pins, Mickey Mouse money, toys, newspaper clippings, and assorted ephemera. “When I briefed the designer for this I told her I was in love with this crazy-looking glass-topped dining table that had bowling pins for legs,” Noel says. “I told her we didn’t have to copy it exactly, but I like the spirit of recycling that it represented.”

“I’m fortunate that my designer totally gets my sensibility; she found some drawers that didn’t exactly belong together, placed one on top of the other at different angles and recycled the whole into a dining table. My only input in the design was to turn the top drawer into a display case and line it with velvet so that it would fit into my museum theme.

“Most of the furniture except for my eccentric dining table is on rollers so I can move everything around easily anytime I choose.”

“As you know, I wanted the unfinished finish a.k.a this whitewashed look to echo all around the house, including my bookshelves. The day before I moved in, I asked my Mom’s maid to help me clean and make the bookshelves a priority. Three hours later, she still hadn’t touched my shelves.

Me: (exasperated) Emma, bakit hindi mo pa nililinisan ang mga shelves?
Emma: (even more exasparated than I was) Eh hindi pa naman tapos pinturahan ‘yan di ba?
Me: Tapos na ‘yan. Ganyan na ‘yan.
Emma: (nose in the air, one eyebrow raised) Gano’n?
Me: Oo.
Emma: (needing to have the last word) Pasensiya ka na. Sanay ako sa magandang pintura, eh.

“How does one reply to that? Maids are such snobs.”

* * * * *

You asked about the TV. It’s on a table beside the bookshelves, waiting to get mounted on the wall.

The other day we watched Noel’s favorite bits from Bakit May Lamangan Kahapon Pa? The scene where Nora Aunor points to her mole and says, “Ee-TOH ang mar-KAH ni YAH-weh.” And the one where she over-methods the math lesson.

Nora: Three plus. . .three plus three.
Child: Six!
Us: Mali! Nine!

Have you heard Nora’s recordings from the 70s? That voice. The quality made the pronunciation irrelevant. The emotion she packed into each song—already the makings of a great actress.

We were having merienda at Mary Grace in Serendra, where handwritten notes from the diners are enshrined under the glass tabletops. While waiting for my coffee, I noticed the handwriting on the stationery in front of me. “Very Assumptionista,” I pointed out to Carlo. “Yes, they have a very distinct T,” he agreed. Then I saw the signature on the note: Direk Khryss Adalia. The note was dated 2007, the year before Khryss died. I knew Khryss a little: he was a lovely person, and his friends miss him every day.

Recently I was futzing with Jeffrey’s phone when I noticed that Khryss’s name was still in the directory; he hadn’t erased it. When friends die I don’t delete their names from my phonebook or email address book, either. I just don’t believe they’re dead.

Sat through 15 minutes of Love Happens, starring Aaron Eckhart and Jennifer Aniston.

Aaron Eckhart, I’m breaking up with you.

Sat through 20 minutes of The Wolfman, starring Benicio Del Toro, Emily Blunt, and Anthony Hopkins.

Benicio Del Toro, I’m breaking up with you.

Saw Hunger, directed by Steve McQueen and starring Michael Fassbender, from beginning to end. Then saw it again.

Michael Fassbender, I love you.

Hunger (2008), directed by the Turner Prize-winning British visual artist (not the late motorcycle-loving American actor) is the most intense, harrowing, and unexpectedly beautiful film I’ve seen this year. “Unexpectedly” because “beautiful” is not an adjective that generally comes to mind when describing a film set in a prison where the inmates smear excrement on the walls to protest the British government’s refusal to recognize them as political prisoners, where the protagonist asserts his freedom by starving himself to death, where you see the violence that people do to each other and to themselves, where you actually feel for the prison guards. I have to collect myself now; I will get back to you.

I’ve only read two of Laurie Colwin’s books, the novel Happy All The Time and the short story cycle Another Marvelous Thing, but I’ve read them so often that my yellowing copies are falling apart. Colwin, who died in 1992, wrote about marital love and domesticity in a manner that might be construed as chick lit if it weren’t so tough-minded. Every time her writing teeters on the brink of sentimentality she lays on the irony. Happy, not sappy, as Jonathan Yardley notes in this piece.

Like most of her fans I keep hoping that some unpublished manuscript of hers will turn up. In the meantime I’ll have to content myself with copying out her stories by hand. Here’s a favorite: My Mistress, from Another Marvelous Thing. (Warning: I’ve only finished writing one-sixth of the story.)

Click on a photo to continue reading Laurie Colwin in cursive. More pages to come.