Dashing through the hues

By Netnet Camomot .

READING two-month-old newspapers is like reading history. Covid-19 history, that is.

Delivery of newspapers resumed in June when the Enhanced Community Quarantine for Metro Manila went down to the next lower level, but it was only last Wednesday that I started reading them since I’ve been busy with Oil Painting. Priorities.

The pandemic is like the Energizer Bunny—it keeps going and going and going… Let’s see if my hard habit to break a.k.a. Oil Painting will outlast the pandemic. Like as if there’s a contest on what will last longer. Uh. If that sounds like the censored kind of “last longer,” that only means your green mind is working hard at having the yummiest breaktime while working from home.

But if ever there’s a contest, it’s on the Most Productive Stay-Home Strategy. Haven’t you noticed? Its “contestants” have been posting their “entries” on Facebook daily. Everyone is suddenly an expert at something.

Meanwhile, my reading, writing, and Oil Painting may qualify for the Laziest Stay-Home Strategy. Ho-hum.

So, should I “paint” a lion, a castle, or a plate of pasta. I’ve already “painted” the one and only piggy.

The “painting” has to feel right for that moment otherwise I won’t have much fun “painting” it while “Dashing through the snow / In a one-horse open sleigh,” er, rushing through the blues and pinks and lavenders or whatever the sky’s colors are this time.

Same goes for the book that I want to read next—it has to feel right for that moment. Hahay. Kadaghan ba sa moments.

Marie Kondo’s advice is for the bookworm to keep only 30 books and for each of them to spark joy. A book is like beauty—it’s “in the eye of the beholder.” And it’s possible for the book to be a potentially good read at the time of purchase but for the connection to be lost and never found by the time I’m reading it 14 years later.

Most of the books I’m reading now were bought more than ten years ago. And then, life happened—challenges galore. For so many years, reading remained as a hobby but it stopped being a hard habit to break. Now that staying home is part of the new norm, I have more time to read. It may not be right to enumerate the perks of a pandemic, but reading is one.

So, I’m now reading Brian Francis’s “The Secret Fruit of Peter Paddington” which opened with “My name is Peter Paddington. I just started 8th grade at Clarkedale Middle School. Six days a week, I deliver the ‘Bluewater Observer’ and the other day, my nipples popped out.”

I don’t know yet what his secret fruit is but I gotta feeling it’s his nipples.

I buy books whose very first paragraph sounds interesting. To avoid realizing later that it’s boring, I then proceed to the first paragraph of some other chapter to be assured of its consistency. And to be absolutely sure, I’d randomly choose another paragraph, hoping for it to convince me. I would then read the back cover to kind of seal the deal. Staying inside a bookstore for at least an hour just to choose one book was part of my old normal.

The new normal is not the time to buy new books, though. Have you heard of how long Covid-19 can live on paper? It could be minutes. Or days. Brrrrr. Better safe than sorry—switch to e-books. I wear a face mask and don’t touch my MEN—mouth, eyes, nose—while reading newspapers and handling documents. That’s the new-normal praning.

Since I don’t belong to the age groups that are usually asymptomatic if ever they have Covid-19, I have to be extra careful in avoiding that teeny weeny, microscopic, invisible virus.

My white hair roots are not there because white is the new black. They’re there to reflect my senior moments, and my lack of motivation to dye them already. I mean, I’m not going out. I’ll wear a face mask and a face shield if ever I’ll go out for that one essential errand that I’ve been postponing since mid-March when the Inter-Agency Task Force began blurting out quarantine levels. So, para que ang ash blonde hair? Hmmm. Let’s see. Okay. For myself each time I look in the mirror. Feeling guapa. Haha.

I have a million and one things to do for my spring cleaning, with reading books serving as the first step in that journey. I may have to add the DIY—Do It Yourself—haircut and hair dye as the next step.