Not a promise: a proclamation...of water.

I like reading blogs and articles. There's so much information out there (some more helpful than others), and I thoroughly enjoy spending (way too much time) reading people's opinions. Although reading can help me become a better writer, there is one other thing that carries a greater magnitude than reading other people's work--writing it myself.

As of July 1, 2011, I will blog everyday. Whether it's a quotation I overheard that day, a musing I had on my walk home from work, or a spark that ignited as I murder my lunch, I'll blog something. Obviously, some entries will be more in depth than others, but if I don't make myself write, I'll be one of "those people" that criticize other people's work without having any to show for it themselves. Boo "those people".

I watched a video, a buddy of mine shared with Stumble Upon today with a "lost interview" of the late Bruce Lee. Obviously, somebody found it. In it, he says, "now water can flow, or it can crash...be water, my friend." I had to go back and listen to it again, but that rocked me.

I just gradated from college, and in my head-down, bulldog-charging-forward motion to avoid dipping into a financial crisis, I've become rigid. As much as I enjoy the structure of professional worlds, my choice to enter a creative industry requires personal fluidity. I must find that balance of chaos and order, organic and calculated, Megadeth and Marvin Gaye.

Thank you, Mr. Lee. I will be water.

Angels and Yankees Goldstar review!

Goldstar: "I reviewed an event on Goldstar. They have half-price tickets and member reviews of concerts, sports, theater and more.
I'm already a member! http://www.goldstar.com/events/anaheim-ca/new-york-yankees-vs-los-angeles-angels-of-anaheim-1?p=F1830851SB"

Zac Brown, summer rain, and the Catholic church

As I was driving home tonight it started raining. More than the light sprinkling that dusted the majority of the drive, but a substantial rainfall that forced me to kick my windshield wipers into high speed. Being the beginning of June in southern California, a rain was slightly unexpected, so it took me back to my time on the east coast where summer rains in Charleston and Virginia Beach were more common.

March 28, 2005 I I woke up for my last morning in Virginia before driving back to California. (Yes, I drove back to California, this would be the third time driving across the contiguous 48.) My final pitstop before heading to Richmond to pick up my travel buddy, Tammy, was my friend Steve’s house. After some last minute reminiscing and a good ol’ “take care, friend” I got in my silver Stratus and drove away from Virginia Beach, and it started to rain. I can’t remember if the rain actually painted the windshield, but my eyelids served as my windshield wipers for the torrential downpour. From October 2001 to March 2005 VB was my home: the Rickover (Hooyah!), Stooges, AJ Gators, Bar Rick, 264 to the water, and the most calming waterfront I’ve ever experienced were among the many loves I was leaving.

Fast forward to today.

A week and a half out from another major milestone in my life, and I’m driving home listening to Zac Brown Band. Quiet Your Mind and Colder Weather were the two songs I played on repeat on the way home, and like music often does, they got me thinking.

The day after graduation (the aforementioned “major milestone” if you hadn’t realized) my girlfriend and I accompanied my mother and sister to a relative of a family friend’s ordination. Yup, he’s now a Catholic priest. When we had arrived, I had thought about how long it had been since I had set foot in a Catholic church (the most recent being my brother’s wedding last July), but in thinking of it tonight, I actually thought of the last time I didn’t set foot inside a Catholic church. In May of 2006 (I know, I’m a chronological basket case, but hey, Pulp Fiction was a really popular movie…) I was in New York with a lovely group of friends, and as we were strolling down 5^th Ave we came up a monstrously ornate Catholic church. The girls wanted to go inside, but I opted out, saying I’d check my voicemail on the steps. The cryptically vague message led me to call my friend Katie back, and she had asked if I had heard the news about my first (and longest) best friend, Angelina, and if I was ok/upset/anything. My initial reaction was that she had gotten married and that I was completely unaware of this momentous occasion. Quite the opposite. On CA-12 from Antioch to Davis, where she went to school (set to graduate that semester), she never made it home.

And just like that, collapsing back from my seated position, on the stairs of a Catholic church in NYC, it rained—the most torrential downpour my tear ducts have ever produced, and closest family member was gone.

I realized tonight that this past Memorial Day shared the same day as the fifth anniversary of Angelina’s passing, but then I thought that this was the first year that I hadn’t been a reclusive little mess about it. Not to say that I’ve forgotten about her (obviously), it just didn’t sit as far forward in my crowded little mind as it always had been. But I’m okay with that. My most recent breakup was shrouded in the fact that I was still in love with Angelina, and that I couldn’t fully invest myself in a serious relationship if I wasn’t over her. Yes, she was my first love, and my first best friend, and when such a sudden passing like hers occurs there are thousands of questions that even more people ask and wonder about—myself included.

I can honestly say that I’ve moved on, and I will forever remember my dear friend Angelina. Having loosed myself from my own emotional chains, I can honestly say that I am tremendously happy in a mutually shared love with a new best friend—the amazing Sarah Emily Caparino. I have loved, and I have lost, and I have rejected love, but where I am now, I love to the same exponential degree that I am loved—an equivalence that I thought to be unattainable.

And so now, as a college graduate, and a man with a new outlook on future endeavors and old memories alike, I start a new chapter. Although new, some things carry over, one of them being, I love my best friend.

Thank you, Summer Rain, for washing me over to reveal this beneath the dirt. Thank you.

To sleep or not to sleep? And so i write.

In 2002, the USS Hyman G Rickover (SSN-709, Los Angeles Class Submarine) was in drydock in Portsmouth, Virginia. One night while I was on duty, I was sleeping aboard the neighboring barge resting for my upcoming morning watch. Notorious for my sleeping in and relieving my watch late, I was yanked out of my slumber by a bucket of water being splashed on my face. Undoubtedly startled, I awoke to the face of my normally chipper but currently scornful shipmate’s face, alerting me to my late start.

In my room there is no one standing by with a bucket of water—only electronic gadgets with the ability to blare on schedule. My body often forces me into deep sleeps where I am unable to regard the alarms. I’ve slept through earthquakes, parts of a hurricane, and torpedo tube testing. Tonight (or this morning, rather) I write because I’m too afraid to go to sleep for fear of missing my early morning call at work. Later tonight, I will join the cast and crew of Gentlemen Redux at school for opening night of our new show.

In my first semester at CSU Long Beach, I was fortunate enough to assistant direct for Lysa Fox with The Torment of Io, one of seven short plays that, together, comprised the mainstage production of Songs of the Siren: The Greeks Remixed. I was cast in another of the short plays, opposite Albert who wrote the movement piece I was the AD for. The week before we opened Songs we were given a directive to add a narrator character to usher in each of the plays, and I was given that opportunity to lasso each Greek piece of the evening. Now in my last semester at Long Beach State, I was brought on to assistant direct under John Farmanesh-Bocca with Two Gents, and a few weeks into the rehearsal process, was awarded the cameo role of Antonio, the father of Proteus, one of the Gentlemen.

Life moves in cycles and swells, and the reflection of my bookend semesters is a testimonial to that. As a Directing Major, I fully intended to direct and/or assistant direct throughout my time here. I did not foresee the amount of acting I would also be involved with in any degree. I love acting. I also love directing. I love the collaboration of theatre, and will always be grateful for the opportunities given to me here at LBSU. Obviously, I also enjoy writing, and over this last winter break (my LAST winter break of my undergraduate career) I realized that as much as I love the theatre, I absolutely love writing, and I don’t “need” the theatre to write. I took my first stab at dramatic writing this past week as part of an assignment for a Cinema and Theatre class. We were instructed to read a novel or short story from a select list and pull sections from whichever text we chose to adapt into a 5-6 page play scene. I opted for Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke and wrote my scene. The selfish process of taking Palahniuk’s words and combing, bending, and twisting of the arrangement to make it theatrical (versus filmic) was exhilarating.

I want to write more. I want to write original works. I want to adapt for the stage. I want to review shows. I need to put my pens to paper and my fingers to the keyboard and tell stories.

I need to tell stories.

Whether they are my own, fictitious, based on others, or however else the ideas may spark, I need to tell stories. Stories that people can learn from, stories that people can enjoy from all socio-economic classes, cultural backgrounds, childhoods, and adulthoods.

…

I need to sleep. When I don’t know, but I need to. With the opening of Gents, my schedule “opens up,” but that just means I’ll have time available to do the scores of things I haven’t been to in the last few weeks.

I fell asleep at the eWheel. This is going up as is. My body’s ready for rest and isn’t giving me much of a choice. Wish me luck.

new beginning

I love newness (if that is even a word). With the leap into the iPhone community I now have the luxury of being able to blog with ease. Much has happened in the little time that has passed in 2011, and much of it is reason for celebration.

That's it for now. I just wanted to draw first blood and get the writing veins pumping again.

We shall talk soon, blog world.

Much love,

Marlon.

more than that

This weekend has undoubtedly been filled with thoughts, prayers, memorials, and flashbacks of the events of September 11, 2001. I’m no different, but in the last nine years, this weekend has had an array of perspective casting memories and thoughts that beg to be written.

September 10, 2010 would have been my 5^th anniversary…if I had stayed with her and in Virginia Beach and got married like we planned to. I didn’t come to this realization in a desire for that life. I came to it as a watermark of perspective. My engagement in 2004 came the day after I separated from US Navy, Sept. 20, 2004. Needless to say, we broke up, and I moved back to Northern California in the Spring of 2005. In the last five and a half years that I’ve been back here, I’ve worked, drank, loved, lost, and learned. I’m now in my final year of my undergraduate program at CSU Long Beach, living with my beautiful, smart, driven, lovely, (I could really go on for a while) girlfriend and much happier than I (thought I) was with Alison and her daughter Anna back on the east coast. There is still much I miss about Virginia Beach, and I will probably always call it home,

but I’m so glad that didn’t just celebrate my fifth wedding anniversary this past week.

I transferred duty stations from Naval Training Center (NTC), Great Lakes, Illinois to Goose Creek, South Carolina in January of 2000. Having finished boot camp not too long ago, my training at NNPTC (Naval Nuclear Power Training Command) was set to begin. It consisted of three parts: six months of Electrician’s Mate “A” School, six months of Nuclear Powers School, and six months of Prototype training. That year and a half in South Carolina was absolutely amazing, Folly Beach, Isle of Palms, Myrtle Beach, all over the place in the humid south. On September 7, 2001, my class graduated from prototype and we received our orders to o

ur respective duty stations. Some of us volunteered to go subs, some carriers, a couple retained to stay in the educational pipeline and teach, and many others off to bases around the world.

My silver, four-door ’95 Ford Escort was packed with all my clothes and I was driving back to California for a month of well-deserved leave before I reported to the (now decommissioned) SSN-709, USS Hyman G Rickover, Los Angeles Class submarine. I followed my fellow newly-graduated nuke, Josh, and his then girlfriend Belinda to Abilene, Texas, where they were from to have some company on the road. We made a stop in Nebraska, and stopped on the side of the road somewhere else in Texas for the worst rain storm I’ve ever seen (apart from a hurricane) before we made it there. With my final destination being Antioch, CA, I went on and made it back to the 925, which actually may have still been 510 at that point, the night of September tenth. It had been more than a year since I had seen my best friend of over six years, and I had called her along the way, telling her that I would stop to see her first before I went home to my parents’ house. Driving up Wildhorse to her house I wore a white tank top, navy blue (surprise!) board shorts, and a Corona visor (also navy blue) and was definitely funky from sitting in the

car for over twelve hours to make it home in that last push. Excited as anyone else would be to see their childhood best friend after 1) such a long absence and 2) after such a great accomplishment as graduating from Nuke School, I rang the doorbell and stood their agitated and impatient to see her. Her sister opened the door with her mother not too far behind, and they welcomed me in, telling me she was in her room upstairs.

You know that scene in Beauty and the Beast when Belle comes down the grand staircase in that golden ballgown? That’s what she looked like to me. Wearing a white t-shirt and a pair of black umbro soccer shorts, she descended the stairs in her home and I was able to hold my closest family member once again. She was still in high school, just having started her final year at Deer Valley Hig

h School, and she was as busy as I was at DVHS, if not more. Actually, she was probably always busier than I, as that’s just the way she was. We sat and talked in her room and caught up and it’s one of my fondest memories of her. Ten years ago, that was, and it’s still as vivid a memory as if it happened last week. Fortunately, I got to see her again before she suddenly passed in 2006, but that evening of September 10, 2001 will always be with me.

Angelina Rose Malfitano (12/12/83-5/30/06) Continue watching over us, please and thank you forever.

The very next morning, after sleeping in, my mother told me to come downstairs and watch the television. The next few moments were a blur, and all I could think of was…I just graduated from school, I have orders to a boat, and I have a month of leave…will I be called in early? What about my fellow sailors who went home to that part of the country? I called my buddy Andy who was from Boston, and he saw the smoke bleeding from the Pentagon on his way home.

I did not get called early because the boat I was assigned to was a special operations boat that wasn’t attached to a battle group. I never went to the middle east, but my affiliation with the armed services made me the immediate sounding board for everyone that I came in contact with while I was in the east bay for those next three weeks.

Over nine years have passed since the events of the World Trade Center crashes. Songs have been sung, movies made, documentaries spun, the list goes on. It has become commercialized, idolized, covered up, and stretched in many ways. I take this opportunity to celebrate that fact that I’m here. I helped a friend move into her new apartment this morning. I saw a friend from Northern California at Downtown Disney tonight, and I snuck in some theatre today with the closing night of a local play festival. September 11, 2010 has officially passed, and now in the early hour of September 12^th, I will go to sleep alive and happy. Cherishing what I have now and have had before. I look forward to what I will and what I cannot forsee. This is about celebration for me and knowing that no matter what happens at any point during the year, not just early September, I will always have a guardian angel.

threes

I’ve stopped a passing of the rule of threes. Two months ago Courtney was in Chicago and I took a trip to the bay for my paternal grandmother’s passing. Last month Courtney and I both were in San Francisco for my brother’s wedding. Today, Courtney is once again on the road, this time with her mom and brother on a vacation in Disney World, and I…this is where the chain is broken…am in Long Beach (but in a new apartment, and occasionally with daily trips to Illyria).

Elena Espiritu de Leon was the last surviving grandparent in my genealogical traces. My maternal grandmother, Pilar Lim, passed in 1989 and I never met her husband, Jose I believe, because he never came to the US with my mom’s family, and I never went there. I think he passed on to a greater life around ’94 or ’95. My paternal grandfather, Aurelio de Leon, passed while I was going to Nuc School in South Carolina, sometime in late 2000 or the earlier half of 2001, I believe. I remember getting a page from my mom (yep, I had a pager back then) and calling her back after the phone call from my apartment line was over. I remember asking if my father was ok, and…that’s about it.

This past Thanksgiving there was a family reunion of sorts on my dad’s side. For some of us, there was no “re” about it, as I had met my dad’s oldest brother and his wife for the first time. Sometime between then and my grandmother’s passing, Courtney and I saw a show at South Coast Rep called The Language Archive. It was a clever play, and one of the most memorable bits about it is that it takes two people to keep a language alive. If those two do not talk, that language fades away and is gone…at the mercy of whatever is hopefully remaining in written records. My parents speak Tagalog to each other, and they speak it to other Filipinos. They are quite fluent and probably will be for the rest of their lives. Neither my brother, sister, nor myself learned to speak that language. My brother and I both took French in high school, and my sister learned to speak Chinese. I learned to speak on stage and publicly, my brother learned to speak computer, and my sister learned to speak for herself. The only Tagalog I know is what’s for dinner (at my mom’s house) and when I was in trouble as a kid—the important stuff. English has always been my primary language, and as long as I can remember back, my grandmother would constantly try to speak to me in Tagalog, a language that all of her children and most of her grandchildren know.

Corn. Really, stay with me, this relates. Until it dies and falls off the cob, it cannot spur further generations. That’s an interesting concept, because, as mammals, we procreate while alive and nurture the offspring. I know that corn isn’t an animal, but it IS alive, and it sacrifices itself to perpetuate it’s own genetic composition. (end of tangent)

My separation from the Filipino culture started early, in junior high and high school even. Fast forward to my time in the Navy, after boot camp (which is conducted in English, if there was any doubt) I was transferred to Goose Creek, South Carolina. Growing up in the Bay Area all I had heard about “The South” involved gun racks, Confederate Flags, pick up trucks and country music. “Culture shock” would be an understatement for the biologically Filipino boy who was in need of an identity stamp transplanted into the Carolinas as part of the greatest Navy in the world. Country music seeped into my soul. NASCAR. A southern accent (true story). I became an American of my own right. Not a Filipino-American, not a Filipino, not even an American of Filipino/Chinese/Spanish descent…but an American. That’s how I answer the questions of “what are you?” when I know full well people are referring to my ethnicity/ethnic background/cultural heritage whatever you may call it. I’m an American. I don’t do a lot of “Asian” things as stereotyped in American society: I can drive well, I don’t drive a race car Honda, I don’t own a rice cooker, or have a shrine to Jesus and or the Virgin Mary in my home. I am good at math, though, and yes I can play the violin, but I don’t play ping pong in international tournaments, and I can hold my liquor quite well.

Often I encounter other Filipinos in hospitals (surprise! Filipino nurses!), karaoke bars, or even at the post office (all places of supported stereotypes), and they ask me, but not after shiftily looking around, “you Filipino?” and I appease them with a, “yes.” They immediately crack into a big smile and most times greet me in Tagalog (which I understand, but cannot offer any other reply but in English), and ask me where my parents are from. When some see me with my white girlfriend, I’m often glared at by older generations, sometimes Courtney gets the evil eye, but you know what, not their relationship…move along.

Close to fifteen years ago, I think, my cousin Janice married a tall white boy from Indiana (who didn’t play basketball…really). I remember it being a mild fiasco because she was marrying out of race, but to me, I didn’t know better, because I just figured marriage is about those two people…not about the two families. Last month, my brother married Doreen, who is Chinese. I now have a brother-in law and a sister-in law, but I don’t feel any different. It’s going halfway out on a limb, but I don’t think my sister nor I will be marrying Filipinos. I can’t make that call for her, but I definitely don’t think I will be, I’ve actually never dated a Filipino, and don’t plan on dating one (or anyone else for that matter) anytime soon. Case in point, the Filipino-Filipino pairing won’t be happening in my immediate family, one of my cousins has, and who knows what the future may bring, but in the group of branches that belong to Bayani and Maria Elena de Leon…they’re the end of the double-Filipino punnett square.

In some cultures, the joining of two families is still that, a joining of two families, but generally speaking, in today’s American society, the term “nuclear family” is ironic because the members of whatever family might occur rarely branch out…if they even stay together. I don’t want my kids growing up not knowing who their grandparents are whether they speak the same language or not. I’ve come to the conclusion that my kids will be of “mixed race” but, you know what? Who isn’t at this point in the game? My kids will be American (unless of course, they are born elsewhere, then yeah…yada yada yada).

I didn’t really have a point or moral to this blog, but I often look at events in my life in perspective…relating to others that may or may not be related right away, but I find a way to make them so. Today’s blog is in lieu of me not being out of town for the third month in a row in the 18^th. Like a letter left in a corner of a crowded room full of friends and strangers, I leave this blog to the information superhighway (which was quite the popular term for “internet” back when AOL and Prodigy meant something). Good day, sir. I say, good day. I’m going to continue being American.