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Cardboard magazine boxes, P19 each at National Bookstore. (The Roger Federer calendar is from last year but I’m not taking it down.)

While filing my receipts and documents I found some flyers I haven’t thrown out. When you emerge from the Paris metro at Barbes-Rochechouart there are all these men handing out flyers for psychics or selling bootleg cigarettes.

Parisian fortune-tellers are not nearly as ambitious as our local manghuhula who not only forecast your fate but also promise to raise the dead.

This is for my pop-up mad (probably just mad) friends: Notecards by David A. Carter.

Set of 8 “Curlycue” cards with envelopes, 1 pop-up design in 4 colors, National Bookstore Power Plant, P929.

One should always begin the new year brimming with a sense of achievement. I don’t mean just meeting work deadlines, but dealing with something that’s been niggling at you for a while. This way you feel like the year’s just started but you’re already ahead.

For weeks I’ve been ignoring the fact that my sneakers are dirty, particularly the white ones. Washing sneakers is a pain and shoe repair shops know it, which is why they charge an arm and a foot to clean rubber shoes. Usually I use a toothbrush to clean the white-sided soles, but they don’t get that white.

Mike’s shoes are always immaculate, but then he’s obsessive-compulsive about his tennis outfits (they must matchy-matchy). I asked him how he cleaned his sneakers, and he said, dishwashing detergent and a sponge.

So I literally washed off last year’s grime from my sneakers. They’re not quite immaculate, but they’re no longer filthy.

Next I broke out the in-drawer organizer that Kermit and Scooter gave me a while back.

It fits into a drawer. The idea is to keep my earrings, rings, watches, whatnot in a single place, out of sight, instead of storing them in candy boxes and tin cans piled on my worktable. This two-tiered storage unit is made of bamboo, easily renewable and eco-friendly. My friends found it at Make Room.

First I had to clear a drawer, and it was an archeological expedition: I found two postcards Ige sent me from Dublin in 1996, a floor plan of the Frick Museum, and bills that should’ve been thrown away a decade ago. Then I put my stuff in the storage unit, which was another archeological dig because I discovered earrings I’d forgotten I own.

I’m often rushing to get out of the house so the accessories I use most frequently these days went into another box for easy grab-and-go.

Finally I picked the first movie I would watch in 2010. This is of vital importance: your choice could ruin your entire year. Last year’s first movie was Il Gattopardo by Luchino Visconti, and it kicked off a great movie-watching year. (Some turkeys, but they make everything else seem so much better.) Didn’t quite achieve my one-movie-a-day target, but I saw nearly 300 231.

My first movie of 2010: Smiles of a Summer Night by Ingmar Bergman. The light-hearted Bergman.

Ingmar Bergman’s house in Faro, photographed by Stephen Shore for W’s Art & Design Issue, November 2009.

Everyone says cursive is doomed. Really? I use it all the time, especially when I want a piece of writing to meander and develop at its own pace instead of rushing to the conclusion. I love sending and receiving handwritten letters: they literally contain their author. You can tell a lot about the author from the way he crosses his t’s and dots his i’s (or draws a heart over them, in which case I stop reading).

I believe that there are messages that can only be conveyed in handwriting. For this and other reasons cursive will not die out entirely but become the province of a few—much like books printed on paper.

It is true that good stationery is now harder to find in Manila. There used to be a couple of shops selling Crane’s paper but they’ve closed. A few weeks ago I spent hours scouring the mall for heavy notepaper (the size you fold once and place in the matching envelope) and finally found a few forlorn (say that fast) boxes in a corner of Fully Booked. This is not right. There’s nothing like a letter dripping with vitriol that can also slice its recipient’s fingers open.

I took this up with Eman Pineda at Adora (at Greenbelt 5), which is exactly the kind of store that should have stationery and writing supplies. He assures me that starting next year, Adora will carry fine stationery. I will alert you when the papers arrive.

Florence and Venice seem to be the capitals of stationery and journals, although the paper sold in Venice often turns out to be from Florence. Pineider, stationers to Napoleon Bonaparte, still has a shop in Florence on the Piazza della Signoria. I made sure to buy something from the store patronized by Byron, Shelley, and Stendhal

even if it was just a sheaf of bookmarks.

No particular connection to post, just showing off handsome cat.

The biannual shearing of the locks at Propaganda. Growth must be controlled before it achieves infinite density.

I was so pleased at the result, I took a picture of myself wearing my new glasses. Remember that horror movie Jacob’s Ladder? Isn’t this what Tim Robbins saw?

Shot my friends wearing the glasses.

Here is Leo’s last photo before he got his Manchu haircut. He’s always wanted a hairstyle out of a King Hu kung fu epic.

Then I started accosting people and asking them to pose with the glasses. You’d be surprised at how many random strangers respond to, “Hi, could you put on these glasses for a photograph?” There was a Brazilian-Japanese model waiting to get a haircut and he seemed happy to comply with our strange request. He said his name was Daniel Kenji Matsunaga. Soon to appear in ads.

Check out this week’s Newsweek, appearing on stands today. I have an article on Kinatay and our national insecurity.

Once a year the Cleaning Demon appears in my apartment and tempts me with the idea that I can transform my hovel into a neat, well-organized, color-coordinated space. My weekend passed in a seizure of house cleaning.

First I organized my cables, wires, chargers and adaptors drawer. I envy my gay friends whose gadgets are kept out of sight in drawers. Problem: I don’t have a drawer for my cables, etc. (Why do gay people have so much more closet and drawer space than the rest of us?) So I went to the P88 Japan home store and got a plastic box to store my cables in. (Fortunately the Cleaning Demon was not accompanied by the Free-Spending Demon.)

It’s clear plastic so I can see what’s in it. This should foil my cat Saffy’s attempts to chew up USB cables, etc, at least until she figures out how to open the box.

Then came the real challenge: I decided to catalogue all my books and cut my library down to 1,000 volumes. That’s the subject of my next column. 48 hours later I am exhausted but smug. The culled volumes will go to public libraries; my friend the BLB kindly offered to transport them. I kept some books to give away to readers.

Want a free book from this basket? You have to be able to claim it in Makati in the next two weeks, or have someone who can claim the book for you. Post a Comment under this entry, name three books you’ve enjoyed recently, and we’ll use our psychic powers to figure out which book in this basket you might like. No, you can’t choose for yourself, and if you do you’re not getting one. Stay tuned for the matches.

Update: At this point there are more entries than books to give away, so some of you (a dozen or so) will get email later this week telling you how to claim your book. If you don’t get a book this time around, it means there’s no book that matches your reading list or there are not enough books, but you’ll still be on file for the next round.

P.S. If your pet won a prize in our Pets Make Us Human contest and you have not claimed it yet, could you drop us a line in Comments below to let us know you’re still interested?