Broken Coffee Cafe

Thank you, Master Joh, for the recognition you have afforded the Broken Coffee Cafe. I am humbled by everything you wrote. I guess it pays to be pissed off with the Unimaginative Shoemakers.

I have taken liberties in grabbing a picture from www.southnfrance.com for the nice trophy to go along with this acceptance speech/post. And I am holding back tears of happiness (and, ok, humility as well) as I write this.

I wrote as I saw and as I felt, with a bit of embellishment from the devious imaginative muse every now and then, and never thought that there was something to it.

Dear Reader, the cafe is the recipient of a (soon-to-be) prestigious award for literature in cyberspace:

The gold medal of The Doodle’s Best in Propaganda Writing.

The Broken Coffee Cafe shares the honor of this recognition with Tamark’s More Than a Mouthful and Lurchie’s Anthology of Snippets.

I want to thank everyone who continue to order Broken Coffee, with the dregs and all.

Thank you for the comments, reactions, encouragements, and rants, that make me realize that even my nonsense makes some sense.

Here’s to all the propagandist bloggers (and all other sorts) in the www.

Salut! 

Passe and limpid as it may sound, I’ve been truly busy.

First, the operation.

Which, for the curious, went out fine. The doctor did a good job of it, slitting my knee open just a teensy bit and extracting the lump from it within the hour. Then the good doctor stiched up the wound, and, until now, I barely feel the excision point, which is now healing nicely. I had grossly imagined that I’d end up with a gaping hole smack in the middle of my knee. So I’m really glad that it’s a pretty neat work. The only drawback during my operation was the assisting nurse who made me feel nervous. She was an intern, poor girl. I was conscious the whole time, and when the doc asked the nurse to hand him the scissors, she did so with trembling hands. Only, she handed him a pair of excising forceps or something. The doc had to stand up and rootle amongst the surgical instruments himself to get what he wanted. I wanted to joke about the situation, but the nurse was so tense from failing in her first practical test that I felt she could inject me with pentobarbital and I’d wake up with my kidneys missing if I did.

Thank you, one and all, for the prayers and well wishes. I made it through. The stitches will be taken out next week, and even now, the wound is healing nicely. There’d be a teensy scar there, but that’s all.

Second, the time.

Oh well, as I am back in the Shoe Factory and was, last week, in the second shift, I can’t just ride off to some Internet cafe (will someone sell me a laptop at a bargain) with a just-operated-on knee and pour out my heart and soul onto the keypad of a PC. I was under the “recuperating” mode, mind. I saturated my brain with primetime goulash from the sole channel that our television antenna could catch in the tropical jungle. I had tone-deaf singers; a stuffed toy posing as a viscious wolf-human and over-emotic real human characters with computer-generated blood-red eyes that were so unconvincing; a crazy spin-off of a Korean teleseries that actually made me laugh; a reality show where everyone cries for one reason or another, or even for no reason at all; and the culmination of a Korean telenovela that featured characters with lousy martial arts skill and appearances as common as my next-door neighbors’ (where’s the thrill in that?) eating my hours away every night that I did not choose to be asleep by seven.

Well, this time, shifts have changed in the shoe factory, and it’s waking up in the middle of the night again for me for the next few weeks so I could get down from my tropical jungle home and fall in with the other elves hammering soles and insteps for the day. (An aside: The Unimaginative Shoemakers have taken to posting parchments of their announcements, thoughts, and rants rather than communicate with us directly. Shoe production has taken a nose dive to one shoe per day, at least in our team, mostly because of this.)

Third, and finally, all the other miscellany.

First day of the dawn shift, my alarm sounded. As I was reaching for the mobile-slash-alarm phone, I felt a sharp burning pain on my wrist, then an angry buzzing sounded near where my head was on the pillow.

It was a hornet! And an angry one. And it stung me!

It may have gotten in from the latticed bamboo slats, probably to take shelter from the rains of the previous night.

But my goodness! Talk about being an ungrateful guest!

Bless genetics because I’m lucky enough to be immune to hornet and bee’s stings and had been known to only suffer minor itching and slight swelling. The sting was sharp, though, and I woke up Ta when I yelped in pain. We had a bit of a battle of wills and wonts when he wanted me to down copius amounts of honey, as in the mountains, the home remedy for stings was honey. It was four in the morning and honey wasn’t exactly my idea of a breakfast for champions. But in the end, a compromise was reached. A teaspoon of honey was the only casualty.

So, Monday morning dawned bright and cheery, and a woman, all wrapped up in scarves and a jacket, with a hornet’s sting throbbing in her right wrist, shattered the morning calm as she drove down on her motorcycle from her tropical jungle home to morph into an elf and enter the gates of the Shoe Factory. After all, what would the world be without shoes?

P.S. For those who tagged me for memes, particularly Lurchie and Gracey, I’ll answer them soon, promise!

I never got around to doing this earlier, but let’s give it for Lurchie, the quilt-weaver who also knows a thousand and one ways to generate cash in a pinch, who finally got the (dot)com that she wished for.

See her new quilt of ideas at http://pencilpushin.com to read about her life as a wage-earner, as a copyeditor, as a mother to two wonderful kids, as a wife to her husband Dhirrac, as a friend, and as a credible resource for anything about telecommuting.
Congratulations, Monkey Keeper.

This is the hypochondriac in me posting this, so pardon the accompanying imagery.

Tomorrow, I’m scheduled to go under the knife. Try as I might not to overthink it, images of me being cut up, sliced and diced still lurk and spring up suddenly, courtesy of the ever-present overactive imagination.

It’s just a minor surgery that would not even qualify me to get disability benefits from social security (heaven forbid!).

It happened this way. Perhaps I received some sort of trauma on my right knee sometime last year. I could not remember how, but I noticed that there was a dot-sized mass almost in the middle of my knee. I didn’t mind it then, thinking that it’s just a pimple or something. But what a place for a pimple to grow on. Anyway, for a year, I ran, skipped, jumped, walked, strode, jogged, pedaled, squatted (although not necessarily as often as I would have wanted) like I usually did. Little by little, my attention was drawn to the dot-sized something on my knee because this time, it has grown to a proportion that could not make me still ignore it. And the pain! Gracious sweet mother! Each time I accidentally bump my knee against something, the pain makes me see celestial bodies float past.

Last Saturday, I had an entirely different business that brought me to one of the hospitals in the city. I decided that, since I’m already there, might as well let a doctor look on the matter regarding my knee. The doc examined the lump and then and there proclaimed that a surgery was in order. He said that it might just be some growth that is benign but a biopsy would still be in order.

Yikes! But he was kind enough to allow me to think it over. So, I decided that he’d remove it Tuesday.

I just came from the medicare office after processing the necessary documents. May things turn out well. I may not be able to ride a bike for a couple of weeks. But it’s okay, considering.

And here’s a picture of my knee with the thing growing there. The growth is right in the middle of the inner circle, drawn on for purposes of relieving boredom.

(Pardon the absurdity, but it’s actually a picture of my knee. )

[surgery images courtesy of dailymail.co.uk and ghia-blades.com]

Today is the longest day of the year, this being the Summer Solstice.

Actually, this Celestial celebration, marked by the ancients as the wedding of the Earth and Heaven, officially begins at a minute before the clock strikes midnight on June 20th, Greenwich Mean Time (around 7:59 AM of 21st June for the Philippines).

The ancients have honored this time with bonfires, feasts, and dancing, grateful for the long day, the shortest night, and the chance to be with those they love.

If it weren’t stormy outside (and if I weren’t in the office), be assured that I’d have a huge bonfire blazing out on a field, with music from the guitar and a makeshift drum. I’d be with friends, and we would wait for the coming of the hour of the equinox, whiling it away with stories and songs.

A happy day to one and all!

Be on the lookout for Fairies!

Doing my regular round of blog hopping, I stopped by one of the waystations of my wanderings — Paulo Coelho’s Warrior of the Light. There, in one of his previous entries, I found a gem, a fount of inspiration for weaver of words.

This is what Paulo has to say about

 

       The act of writing – the reader (Issue No. 170)

 

        “There are two types of writers: those who make you think and those who make you dream” says Brian Aldiss, who made me dream for such a long time with his science-fiction books. Thinking about his sentence and my work, I decided to write some columns on the subject. In principle I believe that every human being on this planet has at least one good story to tell his neighbor. What follows are my reflections on some important items in the process of creating a text.

 

The reader

Above all else, the writer has to be a good reader. The kind that sticks to academic texts and does not read what others write (and here I’m not just talking about books but also blogs, newspaper columns and so on) will never know his own qualities and defects.

So, before starting anything, look for people who are interested in sharing their experience through words. I’m not saying: “look for other writers”. What I say is: find people with different skills, because writing is no different from any other activity that is done with enthusiasm.

Your allies will not necessarily be those that everyone looks on with admiration and says: “there’s nobody better”. It’s very much the opposite: it’s people who are not afraid of making mistakes, and yet they do make mistakes. That is why their work is not always recognized. But that’s the type of people who change the world, and after many a mistake they manage to get something right that will make all the difference in their community.

These are people who cannot sit around waiting for things to happen before they decide on the best way to narrate them: they decide as they act, even knowing that this can be very risky.

Living close to these people is important for writers, because they need to understand that before putting anything down on paper, they should be free enough to change direction as their imagination wanders. When a sentence comes to an end, the writer should tell himself: “while I was writing I traveled a long road. Now I can finish this paragraph in the full awareness that I have risked enough and given the best of myself.”

The best allies are those who don’t think like the others. That’s why, while you are looking for your companions (not always visible, because meetings between the reader and the writer are rare), trust your intuition and don’t pay any attention to others’ remarks. People always judge others using the model of their own limitations – and at times the opinion of the community is full of prejudices and fears.

Join those who have never said: “it’s finished, I have to stop here”. Because just as winter is followed by spring, nothing comes to an end: after reaching your objective, you have to start again, always using all that you have learnt on the way.

Join those who sing, tell stories, enjoy life and have happiness in their eyes. Because happiness is contagious and always manages to keep people from being paralyzed by depression, loneliness and troubles.

And tell your story, even if it’s only for your family to read.

 

The pen

All the energy of thinking is eventually shown in the nib of a pen. Of course, here we can substitute nib by ballpoint, computer keyboard, or pencil, but the nib of a pen is more romantic, don’t you think?

To get back to the theme: words eventually condense an idea. Paper is just a support for this idea. But the pen will always remain with you, and you must know how to use it.

Periods of inactivity are necessary – a pen that is always writing ends up losing the awareness of what it is doing. So let it rest whenever possible, and concern yourself with living and meeting your friends. When you return to the business of writing, you will find a happy pen with all its strength intact.

Pens have no conscience: they are an extension of the writer’s hand and desire. They serve to destroy reputations, make us dream, send news, trace pretty words of love. So always be clear about your intentions.

The hand is where all the muscles of the body, all the intentions of the person writing, all the effort to share what he feels, are concentrated. It is not just a part of his arm but an extension of his thought. Hold your pen with the same respect that a violinist has for his instrument.

 

The word

The word is the final intention of someone who wishes to share something with his neighbor.

William Blake said: all that we write is the fruit of memory or the unknown. If I can make a suggestion, respect the unknown and look there for your source of inspiration. The stories and facts remain the same, but when you open a door in your unconscious and let yourself be led by inspiration you will see that the way to describe what you have lived or dreamt is always far richer when your unconscious is guiding the pen.

Every word leaves a memory in your heart – and it the sum of these memories that form sentences, paragraphs, books.

Words are as flexible as the tip of your pen, and they understand the signs on the road. Sentences do not hesitate in changing course when they make a discovery, when they spot a better opportunity.

Words have the same quality as water: they go around rocks and adapt to the river bed, sometimes turning into a lake until the depression has filled up and they can continue their journey.

Because when words are written with feelings and the soul, they do not forget that their destination is the ocean of a text, and that sooner or later they have to arrive there.

 

Source of Paolo Coelho’s text posted here: Warrior of the Light, a www.paulocoelho.com.br publication

[image of pen courtesy of snappywriting.com; the reader by allposters.com; and the text by creator of circumstance ]

For those of you who have always believed in magic, fairies, and mythical creatures, I’ve got news.

A “unicorn” is alive and well and grazes in a 2.5-acre park in the Tuscan town of Prato.

Unicorns are known, in the mythical realm, for the single horn that protrudes from their foreheads. These creatures are endowed with magical powers. And throughout the collection of literature from ancient and medieval times, the Unicorn has, in one way or another, been mentioned.

The creature pictured here is actually a roe deer that scientists think has a genetic flaw that made it grow only one horn. But the peculiar thing about it is that the horn actually grew in the middle of its forehead. For the rest of the story, click here.

[photo courtesy of Yahoo! News]