Not sure if around two or four o’clock in the morning, but I just woke up overtaken with this feeling of being important yet unloved, like a must-have book according to many finally acquired yet untouched, staying on the topmost corner of a bookshelf, lying lonesome with all these words . . . and so the dust settles in my walls and my system.
Andrea D. Lim, 23, is currently a graduate school student in the Masters in Literature program of the University of San Carlos and an editorial manager in a local publishing house somewhere in the Queen City of the South. She writes poems and literary essays on faces, places, and spaces, no matter the extent of fill and emptiness, the height of insecurity and self-doubt.
Friends tend to ask for her “external reading” services as well, and she has yet to be fully aware as to why they trust her with their material or literary works too much. She’s pointing this out because, for sure, the content in Andeng shows all the whatnots that have led to the evolution of her taste and take on anything under the weather. Her hopes are up that whatever’s posted here will make her more confident in her impressions and preferences, more comfortable in trusting her guts, instincts, and long-held truths.
This blog is her second. (The first blog page is tucked in privacy through a pseudonym ala Pessoa.) She decided to create a new one after seemingly countless attempts to achieve mindfulness and take more creative plunges in the depths of life. Also, writing here will help her combat the looming stress and depression as she finishes her thesis in the graduate program and put restlessness to sleep.
And, oh, her first love in high school calls her Andeng. She hates being called that, really. The only people who had the audacity to do so were the former college dean back in Silliman University and another guy she does not want to recall.
But if she hates it so much, why use “Andeng” as this blog’s site title? you might ask.
A quick Wikipedia search will show you that Andeng is one of the many characters in Philippine National Hero Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere. She is the kinakapatid ni María Clara na mahusay magluto (Maria’s friend who’s almost like a sister and is good in cooking); María Clara has known her for a long time, sharing the same nurse when they were still infants. (Don’t worry, this blog site owner does not use Wikipedia as a main source for her thesis.) She still doesn’t get why she finds this information personally substantial, but she thinks she wants another take on an annoying endearment. This fact is another string attached to Andeng, the happiness-inducing string she now chooses to hold on to.
She believes she can do more decision-making and sorting out in this blog. As for the magaling magluto part, she hopes her baking skills can live up to it. (And her capability of whipping pasta helpings too.)
But this is not a self-serving blog. She writes not just for herself but for those whose voices are refused to be heard by those in power, whose circumstances make dreams harder to attain, and whose specific realities deprive them from being human or being in touch with humanity.
Andeng also thinks this space is an intimate response to those rooting for the success of her attempts to attend to her further queries answered by motion alone. Attempts, attempts, attempts in various forms. Here’s to the beauty that lies in the process of believing in the power of words again, never letting the thoughts on futility of all efforts get the best of her.
Andeng 