Feliz May Edad...

"Jingle bells, my foot smells, I haven't washed my hair...stinky armpits, mossy teeth but I don't really care..hey! Jingle bells, jingle bells, smell me if you dare, I've contracted UTI from last night's underwear."

What did I find in my loot bag this year? An Apple keyboard, a speaker set, a hardbound journal, a set of mocha-colored towels and a big fat check, out of which came my new pair of jeans, a teal-colored shirt and a pair of Hush Puppies mock-maryjanes.

Our family get-together at my mom's house went on till 2:30 AM on Christmas day. By that time all the elderly members (me included) were about to pass out from serious need of sleep and the soporific properties of my mother's excellent chicken galantina. Three-year old Kukob, on the other hand, was kept wide awake by the play-dough set I gave him, the dark horse amongst the dozen other gifts he received this year that cost a whole lot more than the P249 I spent, and weren't clumsily wrapped in promotional Christmas wrapping paper from Surf detergent. He ignored pretty much everything else except my play-dough kit, and that puts me way up in the Cool Ninang Index.

Instead of spending Christmas day lounging around the house and having the Noche Buena leftovers for breakfast, lunch and dinner, we piled into my sister-in-law Ana's brother's nifty black Accord and went on a joyride that began in UP, meandered through Morato and finally ended at the Gloria Maris on Wilson Street in a 7-dish pileup of dimsum and Yang Chow rice. Burp. Merry Christmas!!

He's Maaaaarried, I'm High on Champix, and the Return of Sammy the Cat

Last Tuesday I went out to do my Christmas shopping at the perpetually crowded SM North Edsa (my friends and I keep going back there because there's a Pancake House in the Block and we die for the Panchicken and the bacon waffle). While I was in line for the cash register I got a message from my mother saying that the doctor for whom I spent at least three months acting like a lovesick teenager, is married and already has a kid. Now close your eyes and imagine a hole opening up in the floor under you, and your body free-falling into a cold, deep pit. That was how I took the news. I handed the cashier my credit card and proceeded to fall through the floor.

But only for ten minutes. I was already laughing to myself when the cashier handed me the charge slip for me to sign. I gathered up my shopping bag, stopped next to the hair accessories department, and sent a message to my girl friends telling them the news. Renny, Nikki and Effie (fresh from a migraine, god bless her) showed up one by one that afternoon, and we ended up at Pancake House to give Dr. Dockers a 10-minute postmortem; after which he faded immediately into the background, more important news was brought to the table, and I attacked my bacon waffle with relish.

The relative ease attending my relinquishment of everything at all to do with the doc, and the complete absence of my usual urge to chainsmoke, go on a shopping spree and mentally kick myself until I'm convinced I'm a poor loser, I owe to Varenicline, known as Champix to smokers wishing to quit tobacco for good. I recently completed the initial six-day doses at 0.5mg, and am starting on 1mg tomorrow and taking it twice a day for the next 84 days. This early in the running, I'm already feeling like a different person. Not only has it begun to blur my need for cigarettes; somehow it has made me less prone to lose my head over the smallest dilemmas. Sure, I feel fuzzy for thirty minutes after I take a tablet, and it makes my tummy rumble too, but what is that if I no longer want to kill everyone around me when I can't find my keys at the bottom of my bag?

Sammy, my wonderfully resilient cat, had his monthly blood exam last week and except for slight anemia, he's back to normal. He now weighs 4.5 pounds (from a low of 2.9 when he first got out of the vet hospital), has a very shiny coat, and is back to his old handsome self. As for me, my days of cleaning up cat-sick from the floor and force-feeding a sharp-toothed feline a battery of drugs, are over at last. Sammy comes to greet me at the door whenever I come home at night, and it always makes me happy when he goes to sleep in my lap after dinner.

One crush lost, peace of mind and one animal friend regained. Looks like it's going to be a good Christmas this year.

***A great big thank you, mwah! to my brother, for my brand new Apple keyboard!!!***

Mister DJ, Can I Make a Request?

Last Friday afternoon, I went on a field trip to the armpit of Valenzuela with Doc Luis Gatmaitan, Bing Tresvalles of the CCP and a fellow Canvas awardee, Don Gonzales. The four of us climbed into the Doc's car from McDo Monumento (grazie, CCP, for the cheeseburgers, fries and sundae cones) and fought through sticky traffic on ridiculously narrow roads to get to the Far East Broadcasting station, where we were to record interviews for the Doc's radio storytelling show "Wan Dey Isang Araw".
It wasn't my first time to do a recording, having been invited last year to talk about two older books, but in spite of having talked into that same microphone in two sessions past, I still can't guarantee that I made any sense at all on this third radio appearance. All I can really be certain of is that my voice automatically downshifts one octave in the soundproof booth. I can make myself sound like a buxom brunette who just got out of bed in a teeny-weeny satin teddy. Now you know why deejays always sound so much better than they look.
The actual recording of the interview portions for my book "The Rocking Horse" and Don's "Ang Batang Maraming Bawal" took only about an hour at most, but we ended up staying at the station till late in the evening. After wrapping up work, we invaded the control booth, had the technician produce a pair of headphones, and then took a bunch of pictures on three separate digital cameras. After that, we went on a tour of the rest of the station, ending up in the archive where rows and rows of shelves are stocked with tape reels, cassettes and LP's from as far back as the fifties. I was rummaging in a random shelf when I found, sitting amongst obscure orchestra albums, an LP that ought to be a collector's item for the cover picture alone: "Nora Aunor: Noon at Ngayon".
My fabulous find put everyone into a frenzy, and soon we were all hunting in the shelves for more OPM on vinyl. Eureka! We found one golden oldie after the other. Pilita! Dulce! Cristy Mendoza! Yoyoy Villame! The Rainmakers! The Nailclippers! Manilyn Reynes! Jamie Rivera! Sharon Cuneta (pre-Gabby!)! Gary V! Louie Heredia! Dingdong Avanzado's "tatlong bentesingko" album!
I remember when LPs were still in use back when I was a freshman in college. I remember saving my allowance to buy a 12" remix of Swing Out Sister's "Fooled By A Smile". The cd burst into the market by the time I was a senior, and then it was goodnight for the turntable stereo. Our station tourguide says all the obsolete material in the library will be converted to digital format before they get tossed in the can. No question that the music of a bygone era ought to be preserved. Pity, though, that the shell it came in can't be saved as well.

Who Are the Perverts in Your Neighborhood?

Last Thursday I came home at half past twelve in the evening after dinner with friends. I locked up my garage gate, but I left my main door open, with just the screen door shut and barred. The garage lights weren't turned on, but from where I was sitting I could see the outline of the washing I had left hanging on a rack. I was sitting at the dinner table with the cat in my lap at 1:00 a.m. when I saw the peg set hung with a bunch of socks and a single pair of panties swaying back and forth in the dark. At first I thought it was the wind, but I found it odd that I didn't even feel a breeze coming in through the door. That was when I realized that there was a hand thrust in from the townhouse next door, and it was grabbing at the washing. I started yelling and running for the door, and when I yanked at the peg set, the hand disappeared into a small hole in the plywood sheet covering the grill that separates my garage from the one next door. The townhouse next to mine has been under renovation, and there have been carpenters staying there for the past several months. I'm pretty certain that it was one of those laborers who tried to snatch my stuff of the pegs, and I have no doubt that it was the single pair of knickers he was after and not my socks, because it was the only one that had been removed from one of the two pegs that it had been hanging from. My skin crawls at the thought of any of my things at the hands of a sick pervert, especially that of a smelly shit-for-brains construction worker. I've had to endure cat calls and impolite stares from the crew next door for months and I ignored all these things because that's the way these people usually are; bluster with no brains and zero manners. As long as they kept off my space, I was all right. But after this incident, I'm afraid of being targeted for more than just simple underwear theft. I'm not easy with the idea of coming home alone late at night, and I've taken to locking myself in and closing all of my blinds at all hours. I intend to purchase a can of mace as soon as I possibly can, and have asked around as to how I can legally acquire a gun. Someone once observed to me that I was far too paranoid; padlocking the gate all the time and putting the theft bar on my steering wheel when the car was parked in the garage. For a while I was convinced that I held far too much distrust for my own good, and let down my guard for some time. But now I think I may have been completely right to think that every neighborhood, no matter how safe it may seem, will one time or another be visited by someone of evil intent. I don't intend to be a sitting duck the next time someone invades my space. I will shoot, and I'm not even going to think twice.

Ten Minutes

There's this doctor I had a huge crush on, until 6:10 pm today. I've only talked to him twice; once when I had my ankle checked, and once more when my mother went to see him about a pain in her leg. I was given an opportunity to go sashaying into his clinic one last time, to bring a gift from my mom, who he didn't charge because she was a fellow doctor. Gladly, I accepted the errand, thinking I might bat my eyelashes at a man for once in my life and probably get something going. During the last few days of my scheduled errand to the good doctor's office, I rehearsed all the variations of the probable conversation, got my hair cut and cellophaned to wash out the gray, and paid extra attention to the pores of my face to prevent a breakout of zits. Most notably, I found the time to squeeze in a cleaning at the dentist, because I couldn't stand the idea of smiling at him again with a mouthful of coffee stains on my teeth. When I couldn't contact my old dentist at the Heart Center, and Mission Doc was only a day away, I bit the bullet and went to a hole-in-the-wall dentist clinic located thirty steps away from my office. I knew I was not in a good place when I saw that the lady dentist didn't have an assistant, and her equipment appeared to have been around since 1970. But I opened my mouth anyway, and let her rip. I really don't know whether it was my 18 months of accumulated tartar that was to blame, or if I unluckily wandered into the clutches of the most hamfisted dentist in the entire nation, but that cleaning was the bloodiest thirty minutes of my entire life. Every time I spit into the bowl, I saw red. And when the lady dentist handed me a mirror to check her handiwork, the blood clinging to the edges of my gums made me look like I had just bitten someone's neck for dinner. I paid her 300 bucks and went straight to the drugstore for a bottle of Bactidol, silently vowing never to betray the perfectly lighthanded Dr. Arquiza again, even if he charges twice as much and suffers from a defective telephone.

Today was the day I executed Mission Doc. I made sure that every inch of me was spanking clean (including my now-bloodless teeth), and I put on my skinniest jeans and a shirt reserved only for matters of great personal significance. I walked into a puff of Kenzo Flower. I called ahead and told the secretary that I would drop by at 5:30. On the way to the hospital, I lost several minutes each to a tie-up at East Avenue, a slow crawl at Crame, and to a barreling convoy of some asswipe politician coming through the Shaw-Edsa underpass. When I finally arrived at the clinic at 6:10 in the evening, the secretary was just closing up the office. She told me I missed the doctor by ten minutes, and she asked whether I hadn't run into him on his way out. I wish I did, dearie. I wish I did. And so ends another fantastic fumble by the Twisted Spinster. Perhaps I'll find all of this funny tomorrow, but right now all I feel like doing is going to bed without brushing my teeth. Good night, Metro Manila, and don't wake me up until noon.

Thirty-six. Yippee?

It's 12:54 am on October 21st where I am, and that makes me officially thirty-six years of age. The man I was waiting for lost his way yet again, and so ends my girlish anticipation of the appearance of "The One" as my 11th hour birthday present this year. Every year it is the same; you think this year might be it, but it never is.

I was supposed to treat my friends out for cakes and coffee at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf at The Block, but following the afternoon bombing at Glorietta last Friday, I had to cancel that little party because some of my friends got caught up in the paranoia that The Block might be the next item in the terrorist's shopping list. I understand that they only want to be careful, and I would never drag them someplace that's potentially dangerous, but I've done some thinking and it seems to me that whether you go to the mall today or wait it out till things die down, there's no guarantee that the day you finally feel safe to go there won't be the day some lunatic decides to put an explosive in the toilet.

With nothing to do on the eve of my birthday, I set out alone to the National Bookstore on Quezon Avenue and bought myself a hair dryer (in under 10 minutes; I shop like a man) and two books - Jane Austen's "Persuasion" and Haruki Murakami's "Blind Willow Sleeping Woman". I would have liked to buy a cd too, but they didn't have the Silverchair album that I wanted. On the way home I picked up a cheeseburger meal, put P500 worth of gas in the car (from the money I would have spent on today's cancelled party), and got a P20 Shell coupon that got me a free half-pack of fags that I hope will be my last.

It's 1:34 am on the clock. Twenty-two and a half hours to go. Who knows, maybe he might show up yet. But that's pushing my luck. Expect no surprises, and you'll be just fine. Like it says on my Pilot's calendar: "An Insufferably Inevitable and Obligatorily Happy Birthday to you, you pathetic little wrinkled spinster. Good advice for the perpetually troubled: Suck it up and keep on living."

Citizens of Serendra

Yesterday I travelled an interminable hour and a half from Quezon Avenue to Fort Bonifacio to pick up two books from the 1/of Gallery. The errand itself took less than 10 minutes. My friend Effie and I were starving, so we had little choice but to choose a restaurant and get dinner that we were fully aware would cost easily three times as much as what we are used to paying for nosh (read Chicken Inasal, KFC, McDo or Red Ribbon merienda sets). We ended up at Xocolat, Effie opting for Chicken Panini, and me picking the Chicken Pasta. Excellent choice, and never mind the price tag of 245 and the ungainly bowl shaped like an upside-down hat that threatened to tip over if I exhibited too much enthusiasm for shoveling the contents down my endless gullet. Effie says the prices at their Eastwood branch are lower by about a hundred pesos. The rent at Serendra must cost a bundle; that, or the establishments there tend to match their price range to the thickness of the wallets of the usual clientele - the Gucci-clad tony condo-living jet set (read: not us). We sat dining al fresco and wondering what it would be like to be these people who spend every evening having dinner in a place like this. People who pay 145 bucks for a 4"x4" rum brownie after an uncheap pasta plate, then wind things up with an 85-peso cup of coffee (whistle). Oh, keep dreaming.

We left at 8pm, shoved a final 55 pesos into the Fort Boni treasury for parking my filthy Toyota in a basement full of German vehicles, and drove back to our real lives in QC, and back to eating our chicken dishes without the ambiance.

Ants in My Rice

I'm done with the first 48 hours of caring for a convalescent Siamese, and I have a crick in my neck that refuses to leave. So far I have plunked down 695 pesos for veterinary kibble that he refuses to eat, and a few hundred more on three brands of tinned cat food of which he will eat one teaspoonful and then leave the rest to go bad in the bowl. He puts up a fight when I give him the antibiotics and hematinics he needs to stay alive, and I'm up to my elbows in congealed kitty litter twice a day. I was so exhausted last night that I fixed a sandwich instead of having a proper dinner, and forgot about the leftover rice in the cooker. I found it being attacked by teeny-tiny ants when I was about to sit down for lunch today, but I ate the stuff anyway (without the sprinkling of ants) because I didn't have the energy to make up a new batch. If I am ready to pull out all my hair after only two days of being mother to a cat, then it's likely that taking charge of a human child will have me eating the paint off my walls before he learns to say "Mama". One reason not to be too sorry that I never married or had any kids. Not all people are cut out to be parents; it's pretty obvious to me now that I'm one of them.

In between cat nurse duty, I ran out to do an errand at the bank. Sat in monstrous Katipunan traffic (can't those dimwits at the MMDA see that it's their blasted U-turn slots and unmanned intersections (case in point: Capitol Drive and Balara) that cause the jams??) for half an hour to drive two kilometers, then spent a total of 15 minutes to update a bank certificate. After that I went to the supermarket to purchase cat food that may or may not pass muster with the patient, as well as find out how much a 50-pound box of cat litter costs (749 buckers, egad). Just so I wouldn't feel like I was neglecting myself, I threw in a package of corn muffins and a small packet of Kisses (if you can't have the real thing, buy the chocolate - all the sensory pleasure without the exchange of saliva). There was a middle-aged woman ahead of me in the checkout line, and I couldn't help but notice what she bought - a big box of Mrs. Fields' premium Macadamia and White Chocolate Cookies, and three cans of Slimfast ("controls hunger"). Lady, what a combination you've got there. Don't know if you're aware of it, but those two are going to cancel each other out, and then you'll still have the vital statistics of a giant pear.
On my way out of the supermarket, I passed an elderly woman who gave me a look that had me checking if my shirt had run up and exposed my navel to the public. Turns out she only pencilled her eyebrows the wrong way today - unnaturally long and arched so far beyond the brow bone that her face appeared frozen in a state of shock. May I never make the same mistake when it's my turn to say goodbye to my eyebrows.

That was the end of the entertainment for the day, and then it was back to my cave for another round of cat-related chores, running through a bank statement with 266 bleeping checks (not my account), and the business of making dinner (this time with fresh ant-free rice). The cat sat in my lap while I worked and fell asleep purring. Maybe that's how he thanks me for my trouble. I scratched his head with my free hand. Let out the sigh I had been keeping back all day. Maybe there's hope for both of us.

Expiry Cometh

A long time ago, when I was in my late twenties, I met a distant relative from my mother's side of the family. One of the first things she wanted to know about me was whether I was married. I said I wasn't, and then she asked if I at least had a boyfriend. When I smiled and said that I didn't, she gave me a look that got on my nerves. Ah, yes, in this family someone always gets left behind, she said, and appeared to be quite certain that if I hadn't managed to get anyone at that advanced age, I'd never find anyone at all. I think I would have enjoyed stabbing the freshly-sharpened pencil I was holding straight into her heart. I think she died a couple of years ago; I imagined she insulted someone and that person managed to do what I had only relished in my head. But she had been right about my fate after all. Twenty-seven days to go, and all hope that there is such a thing as "someone for everyone" shall be gone on midnight of October the 21st. That is when I turn 36, that point where I will leave behind the final signpost that says "Last Chance" and drive on to wherever my destination is by myself. I envy those of my friends who are certain of meeting someone, even if they're of the same age as me and have not dated since Edsa the First. I envy that they can still believe that the one meant for them will just suddenly drop out of the sky. Good for them. As for myself, the fat lady has finally sung.

Blue Eyes and a Hairy Chest

I would like to live my life without having absolutely anything to do with the government beyond being regularly bled for E-vat and income taxes that ultimately end up paying for some ugly politician's behemoth SUV and his retinue of beastly bodyguards and grasping mistresses, the yearly treks to the LTO to register my car, passport renewals, driver's license renewals (every driver has been required since the past few years to pee into a plastic cup to prevent junkies from being on the road, but only take a full turn around Quezon Circle and it's plain to see that everyone still drives like they're high), and shooting dirty looks at traffic aides and policemen convened at a hot spot in a patently obvious attempt to bushwhack motorists for bogus violations. Had to add the SSS to this unsavory list yesterday. The people at the office, who were more pained at the sight of me hobbling around for the past two months than I ever was, convinced me to make a claim for the ankle injury. Russell drew up my papers and submitted them on my behalf, then was told that I should personally appear to show the doctor the foot in question. I drove to the SSS along East Avenue yesterday at half past ten in the morning, had to drive around and around the tiny parking area allotted for members till noon before I could manage to grab a slot, and then after I had waited in a barely moving line for 15 minutes, I realized that I was in the wrong branch in the first place. I was supposed to be at SSS Cubao. Desperate call to the ever-reliable Jonny Tuazon, Carlos Superdrug's Man Friday. He drove for me so I wouldn't have to tear out my hair looking for a place to park. My encounter with Dra. SSS, annoyingly, took all of three minutes. She didn't even look at my blasted foot though I was prepared to unroll the bandage that would unleash the remains of the blotchy red convalescent tissues and the odor of a sockless afternoon in sneakers. She waved me off before I even warmed the seat next to her computer. I wouldn't be surprised if I find out next week that my claim's been denied. So much for the Amazing Race: SSS edition.

I had expected that errand to eat up the the whole afternoon, but seeing that it was only 3pm, I went to see a dear old friend at the hospital. The Makati Dog and Cat Hospital, to be exact, and the friend I went to visit was Sammy, our 9-year old Siamese who had fallen sick and disappeared from home two weeks ago. I went looking for him at the neighbor's house and found him at ten in the evening in terrible shape, drenched from the rain and looking like death. I wailed to my sister to drive us to the vet, and I sniffled all the way to Makati with the cat bundled up in my arms like a baby.
Sammy's first tests came out like a death sentence. Dehydration, anemia, kidney failure, liver failure. The vet said he could die any time during treatment. I never forget that Sammy is a cat, but to me he may as well be human, and that day when I was forced to prepare myself for what might be goodbye, I cried the most painful tears I've ever shed in years. Technically, he isn't my cat. He is my sister's. He was a gift from her in-laws, brought home in 1998 when he was a little slip of a kitten, and I remember that he was shy, and stuck his head in between the sofa cushions like an ostrich. I loved him from the moment I opened the basket he came in and he stared at me with his pretty jewel-blue eyes. I've always been the cat person in the family, so it was my lap that Sammy came to prefer to sit on, my bed that he liked to sleep in, and my closet that he napped in while I worked at my computer.
It was heartbreaking when I came to see him a few days after we had taken him to the vet. He was on dextrose because he hadn't eaten, he had a bad cold, was skin, fur and bones and was drooling. His eyes were no longer blue; they were the color of mud. The following Sunday we almost agreed to have him put to sleep, but when my mother and I saw him, neither of us could go through with it. He looked so happy to see us that it would have been cruel to say goodbye when he didn't look as if he wanted to. So we decided to wait another week. When I came to see him yesterday, the vet was all smiles. Sammy had finally begun to eat, and though he isn't in the clear yet, the cat sure was putting up a fight for his life. They brought him to me in one of the examination rooms, and I was so pleased to see that he was off the dextrose, no longer drooling, no longer sneezing, and his eyes were blue again, blue as on the day he came to live with us nine years ago. I picked him up and he was so light I was afraid I'd crush him. So I sat in a chair and he curled up in my lap, just like old times. We sat there for half an hour, me scratching his head, and he making up for the lost lap-time I hadn't been able to give since I moved out from home. Some people will think it excessive to treat pets almost as if they were human, but it makes perfect sense to me to make no distinction between friends with two legs and those with four.

Revisiting Napoleon Dynamite

The song that's currently on repeat on my iTunes, cd player and car stereo is Jamiroquai's "Canned Heat". The song from Napoleon Dynamite's impromptu dance number for Pedro's post-speech skit. The first and last time I saw this movie was one late evening in 2004 in my brother's Melbourne living room. Oh joy, I found a vcd at Astroplus last week. It's not the kind of film that people who weren't geeks will get. I was a high school geek, and that's why I get it. Biggest awkward pencil neck there ever was; terrible at PE, afflicted by acne and a bad haircut, who practiced dancing alone in her room, who went to dances completely unaware of the fact that I was badly dressed, who tried to fit in with the cool kids but never actually did. In time I outgrew the dweeb exterior, and gained a fair bit of rhythm for dance and sports, but at the core I'll always be a square peg in a round hole.

It's Atay Balun-balunan! And an Afternoon with Dr. Dockers.

Slap me if I'm dreaming: "The Cat Painter" won a National Book Award in a tie with Gilda Cordero-Fernando's "The Bad Kings" today. I got a flood of messages on my phone starting at around six in the evening and up until half past nine. And where was I? In the middle of Edsa with my mother, driving home from a doctor's appointment. I wasn't expecting to win, so I skipped the ceremonies and went to have my ankle checked instead (Doc Nikki, if you're reading this, it is not true that I am pregnant with Jon Heder's baby). I could kick myself for not having any faith in my book, but my regrets are not quite as deep as they should be. If I had cancelled my appointment at the clinic, then I would have missed having my foot rotated by the antithesis of Dr. Acidwash -- Dr. Levi's Dockers. No Nora Aunor mole this time, no snide remarks about staying away from the mall, and no leery smiles that would make your skin crawl. Holy cow, this doctor was actually good-looking, and too bad I'm not enough of a lunatic to sprain my other ankle just to have a reason to go back there. Dr. Dockers gets full pogi points for explaining to me, in laymans's terms, what happens when one has a sprain, and illustrated the arrangement of my ligaments with the use of interlaced fingers. I listened like a good patient, while simultaneously checking whether he was wearing a ring. Looked and saw none, but then I remembered that my mother was sitting right outside the door, so I mentally slapped my inner bimbo and decided to rein her in before she made me do anything pervy with my toes. Ugh! My toes! Good thing I had the good sense to attack them with a foot brush this morning or it would have been a nightmare when Dr. D asked to see both my feet and found them looking like I had just been to a rice field with a carabao. I was horrified to see that my toes were purple from the airconditioning, but at least they were clean.
Not a bad day at all, even if I didn't get to shuffle up to center stage to accept my award. Not every day you get to be named a National Book Awardee in absentia AND get to play footsie with a cute ortho...free of charge.

Penny-pinching for Dummies

Yesterday's headline screamed "RP Stock Prices Dive 6%", and shareholders' gains since January went up in smoke. I don't own any shares of stock, but I do have a small unit investment that took a dive yesterday as well. Fortunately I've never trusted my luck very much in terms of taking risks, so this potential loss will not have me sleeping in a cardboard box in the next few months if the bottom falls out of the PSE.
I also read in yesterday's paper that a certain official from the Bureau of Customs lost a $500,000.00 investment to a Singaporean businessman who just up and disappeared one day. In local currency that would be somewhere in the neighborhood of 24 million. If I had that much money already, I'd stop trying to get some more. Then again, it's one of those people at Customs, and it's no secret that they're a bunch of greedy swamp-dwelling beasts who'd sell their own mothers for a few bucks. I'll bet that half million dollars came from grease payments.
I don't much care for rich people losing money. I feel sorry for ordinary working-class citizens who take a chance with their savings only to end up watching it frittered away on a bad investment year. People like me who get talked into stepping outside the relative safety of the bank for a chance to turn their peanuts into...well, macadamias.
Now that it's beginning to look like there will not be a harvest of better nuts at the end of the year, it's time to turn up the thrift button -- one survival skill you should have if you're one of those people less adept at making money. Perhaps you would be more adept at trying not to lose it. If a few pesos can be saved from one penny-pinching measure, then employing several must translate to a substantial amount at the end of the month. Here are some things that I do to cut back on my expenses:
1. The obvious thing - don't keep the lights on in a room if you are not actually there. In the evenings I turn out all the lights downstairs when I am up in my room. Never mind that the house looks like a dark cave to people walking by. They're not the ones paying for my Meralco bill.
2. Take advantage of any opportunity to ignore your electric fan. Now is a perfect time, with all these rainy days and cold air. Open your windows for 100% free, all-natural air conditioning.
3. Take your baths tabo-and-timba style. Don't heat water if you can stand the water temperature.
4. Go easy on the toilet paper, it costs 10 pesos a roll these days, and I'm not talking about those brands that are silky-soft on top of being embossed and blinding white. Why spend extra for something that's only going to end up wiping your butt? But if you'd rather not purchase cheap TP that is pink and only one small step away from being sandpaper, choose among the middle-range brands. How to tell which ones give the better deal if the rolls appear to be of the same size? Give them a squeeze and you'll find that some are more densely rolled than the others.
5. Don't believe that only toothpaste with three colored stripes or blue crystals will successfully clean your teeth. All it needs to be is white and with flouride.
6. Soap is soap, and I found out that the difference between the beauty bar with 1/4 moisturising fluid and a locally-produced baby soap that costs only half as much is that the beauty bar melts twice as fast for twice the cost.
7. Never eat out if you can help it. If one home-prepared meal costs 10 pesos to make, one cheeseburger meal will set you back by 72 pesos. If you need to eat out, then just skip the softdrink and ask for water.
8. Avoid the mall unless you're going there to buy something you need or meeting your friends to see "Blades of Glory" (I love you Jon Heder!). Otherwise the P30 you'll be paying for parking becomes a needless expense, and so will the gas you consume to drive there.
9. Enroll your utility bills in your bank's atm payment facility so you can knock all of them off at one go the next time you withdraw your weekly allowance. Bam! Four birds with one stone, and no extra gas consumption.
10. Set a charge limit on your credit card. It helps if there are only certain expenses that you assign on the card. Mine are groceries, car maintenance, clothing, and fun stuff like books and music. I always do the groceries first, at the beginning of the billing cycle, and then that's how I know how much I have left for the other things.
11. Forget ironing, unless it's a blouse or a pair of slacks. Jeans never need ironing, and so do t-shirts if you put them on a hanger to dry.
12. Buy a cellphone card instead of purchasing autoloads that involve a smaller amount, but expire so much faster. Do not reply to people who want to be your text pal, do not forward "a flower from St. Theresa" to ten of your friends to make your wish come true, and do not register, for 15 pesos, to the Honda CRV raffle which you are not likely to win if your nextwork has over 3 million subscribers.
13. Take baon to the office, as well as a thermos of water. Do not buy bottled water! It's a ripoff, any way you look at it.
14. Set aside something every month from your regular income that's small enough not to pose a noticeable hit on your operating budget. If you would rather not bother if all you can spare is a hundred bucks each month, then you'll never get that savings account started at all. Don't wait around for a windfall in case it never comes.
15. You can live without an iPod, even if everybody else seems to need theirs to breathe.
16. You don't really need a phone that does everything short of controlling someone's brain from across the room.
17. Stop buying cotton buds. I know they're convenient, but you know what costs a whole lot less to clean out your ear? A plastic stick and a small package of cotton. Last you damn near more than a year.
18. Let your car get absolutely filthy before paying 60 bucks to have it cleaned at the carwash. The car's not embarrassed to be filthy, so why should you be? Better yet, clean that car yourself with a chamois cloth and a bucket of water.
19. If a pretty little trinket catches your eye and you want to buy it because it's cute and it costs only twenty pesos, stop and think again. By next week it will be a piece of cute junk that will join the rest of all the cute junk sitting in your drawer.
20. Unplug all appliances after use (except the fridge, obviously). Even when they're turned off, they're still consuming electricity on standby.
21. Buy the bigger package whenever the budget allows; it always comes out cheaper. But this only applies to things that will not spoil, and which are consumed on a daily basis: toilet paper, toiletries, detergents, coffee, sugar, rice, salt...you get the idea. Stay away from those stupid one-to-two use shampoo sachets and the like. You're paying for the packaging there, not the stuff that's in it.

Want some more? I've got some more. Or would you like to hit me over the head now?

Lutzing after Jon Heder

If you need a laugh and you want it served ice cold, go see "Blades of Glory". Effie and I went to see it today (to hell with the budget and bosses who won't pony up) -- and it had us snorting from start to finish. Will Ferrell and Jon Heder (ooh, I have a thing for this guy) play banned champion singles skaters forced to team up as a man/man pair to make a comeback in the sport. The idea of two grown men cavorting on the ice in glittery, skintight catsuits...funny. Two hours worth of actual man/man skating action...mad genius. Nobody does indecent exposure like Will Ferrell. If the sight of his naked behind in "Old School" made you cringe, he's even more obscene when his figure is fully-clothed in skating tights. He is the incredibly self-assured Chazz Michael Michaels, the embodiment of lechery on ice. And if you liked Jon Heder as geeky Napoleon Dynamite, you'll love his adorably effeminate, pastel-clad Jimmy MacElroy.
The two of them together in their coiffed and spandexed glory, grooving to Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" and Queen's "Flash" is just absolutely...sick! Do yourself a favor and give yourself intestinal cramps courtesy of comedians with no self-respect. This is gas you won't want to blow out of your ass.

Somebody Kill Me Now

This is one of those days when I feel like repeatedly banging my head against a wall until blood starts coming out of my ear. My budget is completely screwed because my boss is sitting on my salary, apparently not concerned that I have to borrow an egg from my mother just to tide me over for one freaking meal, nobody loves me except my cat (and it's not even human), it's all but confirmed that I've just lost at the Palanca awards, and I'm still walking like I have a prosthetic foot. The house is filthy, my clothes are all old and ugly, my gray hair is showing, and I'm turning thirty fricking six in less than two months. It doesn't really help that I know that some people have it worse. Honestly.

And the Best Actress Oscar Goes To...

I think the tide is turning. My first sign of good luck came when I got stopped this afternoon for running a red light while on my way to work. I thought about running the MMDA man over with the car, but I changed my mind, pulled over, cranked the window open and handed over my license, with a smile. I do not know whether I had the ridiculous luck to get the one single honest traffic aide in the entire MMDA, or if the man could tell from the way that I didn't appear to be scared, that I chewed the head off the last traffic aide that tried to separate me from my lunch money. He asked me where I was going, and that was it. He let me go.
Second wave of good luck? A text message from a friend, telling me that my book, "The Cat Painter", is a finalist in the children's book category of this year's National Book Awards. I'm up against tough competition, and winning is a long shot, but I'm already a-ok with nominee status.
It's probably true that good luck comes in threes. I read my email after I got home from work, and I've just been told that my first royalty payment for the aforementioned book has just been credited to my bank account. It's not much, but it sure does look so much bigger when it's standing next to nothing.
Oh joy. Open up my eager eyes, 'cause I'm Mr. Brightside :)

Alohomora...Lumos...Stupefy!!!!

The one other good thing about being forced to stay immobilized at home on account of a bad ankle, apart from being spared from having to be outside these days in foul weather, is having time in one's hands to read a 759-page book in 12 hours. In this case, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which I borrowed from my sister last night, and began reading at 1:00 in the morning after I had gotten home from Doc Nikki's birthday dinner.
I had stowed the book away under the seat of my car when I drove to Wheatberry to meet up with the girls, and then I forgot about it in the glorious company of giggling, squealing, snorting thirtysomethings. Buzzed up with pizza, pasta, cakes and coffee, we discussed everything from scary dads to horses to linkin park to mutual funds to plastic surgery to faith healers to yoga to rondallas to cat-sized rodents to theme parks to pole dancing to obla di obla da...ad infinitum. We were the last to leave the cafe, when everything but the chairs we were sitting in had been put away and the poor security guard's eyebags were hanging over his cheeks. Some of us were due at work in the morning, so we broke up the party somewhere after midnight.
I intended to read a few pages of the book to help me fall asleep, but as it turned out, I kept right on reading till 5am. I picked up where I left off when the rain woke me up at 11am, and pausing only to take bathroom breaks, make breakfast and lunch, and wash my dishes, I flipped through the pages like a desperate crammer hours from a make-or-break exam. My curiosity about the fate of the characters was finally put to rest at just before 9pm. I was right about R.A.B. being Regulus Black; my guess that Dumbledore or Sirius would somehow return was wrong. I had an idea that Snape was going to redeem himself, but I have to say that the back-story about him having been in love with Lily since childhood, though it explained a lot about his behavior, seemed to have come from nowhere. Like all the Potter books that exploded in length, starting with The Goblet of Fire, Hallows teems with characters, twists and details that cause a bit of confusion. Nevertheless, Harry Potter's still a damn good story. So damn good I am certainly going to buy the two more books I'm missing from the series, and these beauties will be listed in my last will and testament.
One question though. If Harry is a descendant of Ignotus Peverell, and the Peverells are descended from Salazar Slytherin, and the Gaunts are related to Slytherin, and Tom Riddle is the son of Merope Gaunt, then wouldn't that make Voldemort and Harry related to each other????

Countdown to the Palancas

It dawned on me today that there's only 29 days to go before the announcement of this year's winners of the Palanca Awards. I desperately want to win in either of the two categories I entered. Oh so desperately, because I haven't earned a single cross-eyed nickel (singkong duling?) for any of the crap I've written this year. It doesn't look good for me, though; I can't seem to stanch the bad luck that's been following me around since January. But even if I tell myself to weigh the odds and forget about winning, I'll still be waiting, like the idiot that I am, on tenterhooks for a couriered invitation to the awards dinner. Only when I see the announcement in the papers and find that my name isn't there, will I accept defeat, tattoo the word "LOSER" on my forehead, go out and drown my sorrows in a large order of fries and a greasy cheeseburger.

If the refusal of my ankle to agree to a speedy recovery is any indication of my luck, then I've already lost. It's no longer swollen, but now it's gone rigid. There's no other way to get around but to walk like I've got a peg leg, and because I don't have a real cane to use, I've been clumping around with a 5-iron golf club. Hurry up, ya stupid foot! There's a mountain of paperwork building up at the office, and I'm running low on supplies. Won't be long before all I'll have in the fridge is a lonely egg and the shriveled remains of a cabbage.

The Pestilence of Housekeeping

Since being lamed by playing badminton in the wrong shoes (I refuse to believe this injury has anything to do with my skills at the sport and would rather place the blame on my attire), I've had no choice but to suspend regular cleaning in certain areas of the house. The living room is so thick with dust that anyone walking through it will leave a footprint on the maroon tiles, and if you plop down on the sofa or either of its matching armchairs, you are certain to stir up a small cyclone of dirt. I see a little mold building up in the toilet bowl and around the drain of the bathroom sink, but to save myself the strain of trying to clean up while standing on my left foot like a flamingo, I've chosen to wait till the mold has bloomed into alarming proportions before launching a half-hearted attack with Dutch Cleanser and a scrub brush. The glass top of the dining table is sticky with water spots and microscopic crumbs from the past 90-odd meals, and anyone taking a seat on the chairs that haven't been wiped down since mid-June is sure to leave behind a detailed imprint of his ass. (I use "his" but I have yet to offer a seat in this house to a man). My clothes hamper is bursting at the seams, and it would not surprise me if there is some spawning going on in the crotches and armholes of my dirty laundry.
My bedroom is the only place that has been recently cleaned (and by that I mean two weeks ago). Took me fifteen minutes to drag the vacuum cleaner up the 14-step stairway, and two days to eradicate the dust, section by section. I think it might've contributed to the ankle relapse, but at least there's one place in this house where I'm not sneezing my nose off my face.

An Afternoon with Dr. Acidwash

As a direct result of my mistaken notion that a sprained ankle takes only slightly longer to heal than a paper cut, I have gone and elevated my injury from moderate to severe by going to work, going to the mall, going to the beach, and walking up and down the stairway fifteen times a day in a bid to keep to my household schedule. The foot began to feel like a live pincushion pierced with shoemaker's nails last Monday evening, and I only managed to get myself home from the office by propelling myself forward with a series of small hops and jerks. When my friends Nikki and Effie dropped by on Wednesday afternoon, they took me to East Avenue Medical Center, and I grudgingly submitted my foot for examination by the orthopedist on duty. When this doctor came sashaying into the clinic in a pinstripe shirt tucked in acidwash jeans, I felt like bolting and finding some other doctor with better fashion sense. I do know better than to size someone up by what he wears, but this was one of those rare instances when you find that you CAN judge a book by its cover. Dr. Acidwash had the bedside manner of a barracuda and all the refined good breeding of a wet market vendor beheading a live chicken. When we got sent off to have my ankle x-rayed, the people manning the department appeared to have been spawned from the same dark matter. A squat nurse whose white underwear was plainly evident underneath her white pants (the x-ray look, to match her assigned post) regarded the patients with a sour look on her face as she plodded back and forth on feet that echoed on the floor like a small pachyderm's in a circus enclosure. The two xray technicians kept roughly yanking my foot in different directions even when it was perfectly obvious I was in pain. One of those meatheads grabbed my toes and pushed until my face turned white. I was glad to get off that table when they were finished, but I pitied the other patients waiting for their turn. I understand that patients of public hospitals do not usually come under the category of well-heeled, and it's an observable fact that the hoi polloi are constantly in the receiving end of bad service, but when people are sick and in need of comfort, shouldn't a hospital, at the very least, supply this one simple thing regardless of their ability to pay?
When we made our way back to the orthopedist's clinic, I spotted an empty pizza box outside the door, lying open on the floor, five inches from a trash can, as if somebody had tossed it out the door, missed the can and didn't care. I picked up the box and stuffed it in where it belonged. We walked into the clinic, and there were the doctor, his secretary and a medical representative, helping themselves to pizza while watching tv. There would have been nothing surprising about this scene if we were at the waiting room of a provincial bus station, but at a physician's office that clearly states "Chief of Section"? Holy mother of god.
I did the best I could to stay polite, even if it was perfectly clear to me that this was a place where politeness was neither used nor appreciated. Dr. Acidwash ran a perfunctory eye on the xray plates, wrote me a prescription for Lumiracoxib, gave me instructions for hot compresses and a week's worth of staying off my feet, wrapped my foot in bandages, and said that if my ankle doesn't heal because I can't resist going to the mall, well, he really doesn't care what his patients do once they leave the clinic. Something does get lost in translation because it's really much more appalling to hear in tagalog ("Wala akong pakialam kung ano'ng gagawin ninyo pag umalis na kayo"). Ugh. What a complete troll. I'm supposed to come back and see him in two weeks if my foot doesn't improve, but I would rather get shot and fall into a tank full of piranhas rather than endure another afternoon with the reigning King of Crass.
I took my xrays home and I'm thinking of having them framed on both sides with glass; a memento of my brief but traumatic run-in with the hospital staff from hell. As of this moment, I've survived my first 24 hours of self-imposed incarceration. I'm a quarter of the way through "Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prince" (bought especially), I'm keeping my foot wrapped and elevated, and I'm religiously taking the salmon-colored pills that dull the pain but have a nasty side-effect of diarrhea. I'm already bored silly, but that's a small price to pay to get back on two healthy feet, and to never, ever have to set foot in that clinic again.

*** Thank you, Effie and Nikki -- if friends were credit cards, you'd both be platinum. ***

Harry Potter and the Order of the Lava Cake

Doc Nikki and I went to see the latest Potter film last wednesday with Michaela, who was the only diwata who showed up to meet us at the Block. It was freezing, freezing cold in the cinema, but what was that when there was nicely grown-up Daniel Radcliffe to radiate a little heat from off the screen? Okay, that sounds a bit pedophiliac, doesn't it? Gosh, I wish I were seventeen again.
My hat's off to David Yates for being able to cobble a movie out of the impossibly thick "Order of the Phoenix". Reading that volume was a nightmare for me because it was choked with characters and details that tended to fall off the stack as the story went on. I thought this new movie was choppy, but it did a fine job of extracting the gold out of the ore. My favorite scenes? Dumbledore's army practicing defensive spells in the Room of Requirement, and the charmingly loony performance of Luna Lovegood. I have to say that although the Harry Potter-Cho Chang extended kissing scene was a thrill (I sound like such a perv), I'm gunning for Ginny Weasley because they look so much better together (her and Harry of course, not her and Cho--now that would be lesbian).
After the movie (and after defrosting the icicles that clung to our exposed body parts), our trio had an early dinner at Bacolod Chicken Inasal, peeked into a few shoe shops, and then ended up at Fully Booked. The doc and I debated briefly about the pronunciation of "Maugham" as in W. Somerset (my guess was wrong and hers was nearly right; it's 'môm', according to the Oxford english dictionary), waxed ecstatic about Edward Norton playing the deliciously straitlaced but sexy Dr. Walter Fane in "The Painted Veil", and then we had to calm ourselves with coffee at The Press. We split a lava cake between us (a la mode!) and had yet another moment of ecstasy. Teenage wizards and bacteriologists happily forgotten, for the meantime.

I've Got Sand in My Ass (Boracay Part two)

The sun shone on day two of our Boracay vacation, and the gang was up at 7am to grab a quick breakfast and head on down to the beach. It was wonderfully sunny, and the sand under our feet was the color of polvoron.
The wind was blowing stronger than it did the day before, and though I was itching to jump in and swim, I was far too afraid to get towed away by the waves. It was hard enough for me to stand thigh-deep in churning water on my one good foot, so I decided not to tempt fate and settled for sitting down and letting the waves crash over my head.
The saltwater stung my eyes, my hair was a godawful mess, and I ended up carrying a whole lot of sand in the inside of my swimsuit bottom, but oh how I love the beach. I am allergic to seawater and I plodded back to the inn with a rash all over my face, but half an hour under a hot shower fixed all that.
An enterprising pedicab driver named Buboy (my sister thought his name was "My" at first because that was the name that came with the cellphone number he gave her -- I found out later that he stores it as 'My' to mean 'my number'...get it? get it?) -showed up at the alley entrance two minutes after being texted, and we were spared a long walk to the restaurant for lunch. Zuzuni's was yet again out of our reach, as it was closed for a special event, so we made do with Sea Lovers, where most of us ordered curried shrimps. Delicious. And this time around there were no cats having bathroom breaks on the floor. There was, however, the matter of annoyingly slow service, and their chef's salad looked suspiciously like a giant dish of coleslaw.
My sister, May, Tita Angel and I then went looking for Real Coffee to try out their Kalamansi muffin, which my sister had read about in a MarketMan restaurant review on the Web. It was moist, it was tangy, it was perfect with coffee or tea. We ended up buying all the remaining muffins to take back home to Manila, enough to wangle a discount from the american proprietress. My sister ordered a pot of ginger tea and didn't finish all of it. They didn't have anything but a peanut butter jar in which to put the remains of the tea, but rather than let half of what she paid for go to waste, she carried back to Station 3 what must have appeared to everyone else as a urine sample. On the way back to the inn we kept stopping to take a look at the trinkets being hawked all along the beach. One wonders whether there is only one manufactory of bead bracelets and necklaces in the whole of Boracay because the vendors all seemed to be selling the same stuff, only at varying prices, depending on which part of the island you are at -- the tony end (prohibitive, clueless white tourist prices), or the backpacker end (significantly cheaper).

If in Manila there are ambulant vendors selling passport jackets and cellphone chargers in a traffic jam, in Boracay there are hawkers of wood carvings of religious figures.
I don't know if anybody in his right mind would want to purchase a Virgin Mary carving on the beach, but judging from the number of vendors I saw selling these things there, I imagine there must be people out there willing to stuff a large block of wood into their luggage on their trip back home. I was content to grab a few colorful cord-and-bead bracelets for my friends.
We had our last dinner in the quiet dining area of Dave's, away from the hustle and bustle of Boracay nightlife. It was here that I tasted the best fried chicken I've ever had in my entire life (sorry, Max's and KFC. Sorry, Renny -- but your 7up chicken comes a close second). Light and crispy on the outside, juicy on the inside. Even Freckles the dog must have thought it was the best item on the menu, as he was caught stealing a chicken leg from the kitchen (this particular chicken leg was not to end up being served to the guests -- they let him have it, after a token scolding from his owner).
I found myself spending my last evening at the inn sitting on the porch again with pen and journal, wishing life could always be spent only two minutes away from cream-colored sand and clear blue water. In all honesty it bothers me that Boracay has turned itself into a seaside Greenbelt since I last visited in 1998, when there were still wide empty spaces for greenery to breathe. I suppose development often goes out of control wherever there's a living to be made, but as long as the water runs blue and sand stays fine as powder, perhaps the charm of Boracay will live on to keep us returning to its shores.

(Sort of) Tall and (Not at All) Tan and (Trying to Look) Young and Lovely, the Girl From Quezon City Goes Shuffling...

At 8am last sunday the 8th, I boarded a Cebu Pacific flight to Kalibo, Aklan en route to Boracay with my mom, my sister, her husband, my nephew Jakob who had just turned three that day, his aunt May and other grandmother Angel. I had on my ancient mojos, my right ankle was wrapped in a tight bandage, and I had strung around my shoulders all my beach essentials in a bursting messenger bag, a backpack and a canvas handbag. It wasn't easy lugging all that stuff around with a bad ankle, but I limped along as fast as I could to keep up with the rest of the party.
My nephew, at the tender age of three, having already been to Australia and China, is so used to flying that the first thing he asked us when we took our seats on this first local flight was "where are my headphones?". Then he took down his tray table and said he wanted to eat. It came as a surprise to me that inflight snacks are no longer served, but sold for fifty pesos and upwards. It was surreal to hear the cabin crew calling out "snacks for sale! snacks for sale!" while trundling a cart down the aisle, as if we were having a rest stop in a third class bus and they were vendors hawking espasol and shingaling through the window.
From Kalibo Airport, we hired a van to take us on the hour-and-half ride to the ferry port in Caticlan. From there, we boarded the 20-seater outrigger "Alona" to Boracay island. A multicab took us down the winding road to Station 3, dropped us off at the old site of the talipapa (now dotted with misspelled signs),where we were to walk the rest of the way to Dave's Straw Hat Inn.
Dave's is a little establishment tucked away at the end of a dark alley. Anyone taking his first walk through the ugly path towards the inn will have a pleasant surprise when he reaches the black iron gate, which opens into a lush garden with a pebble-and-flagstone path.
Guests are welcomed at reception with cold tall glasses of mango iced tea, and a friendly white labrador named Freckles will circle the area for a pat on the head.
We never made it to Zuzuni's at Station2 because my mom was hungry enough to have a 3-year old kid for lunch, and she was tired of walking. We ended up at a chicken inasal restaurant that had its tables arranged underneath a thatched hut, with no flooring, just beach sand. The barbecue was excellent, but here's the kicker. There were darling little cats roaming under the tables, but it was a while before we realized they weren't really there to beg for food. I wasn't quite finished with my chicken leg when I saw a small tabby burying a turd in the sand. If you ever find your way to Boracay, best to steer clear of this giant kitty litter box.

It was rather too windy that first day when I went down to the beach, and the waves were much too strong for swimming, so I just sat at the shore and watched the boats go by. I found pieces of glass from a broken bottle where I sat. I picked them up and put them away in my bag. I like to think that I was sent down to that particular spot in the entire beach to save someone from a nasty cut on the foot. I ran back to the inn when it started to rain, and somewhere in the alley that leads to Dave's, I lost my favorite sunglasses and wasn't aware of the loss until many hours later. I only hope that whoever picked it up will go blind.
Jakob's birthday dinner ended with the come-hell-or-high-water (literally) birthday cake, and we retired to our rooms past 9pm. The porch railings were lighted with tea candles in jars; incense sticks burned in the plant boxes, and mosquito coils were set out in the corners. I sat outside writing nonsense in my journal, foot bandaged for the night and propped up on an extra chair. A cute caucasian in a red shirt (yes Renny, the Roger kinda-lookalike) at the reception desk happened to glance at me from across the way. Was he looking because a) I looked good in the porch lighting or b) I looked exceptionally bad in the porch lighting? We'll never know. He left with a woman companion, and I was left to ponder the future of my injured foot. There I was, being all pensive and whatnot when...banzaiiiii!!! A fat rubbery lizard plopped heavily onto the page I was writing on. Scared me so much that I let fly both pen and journal, and the scene-stealing gecko scurried away into the bushes, perhaps to plan its next skyjump into the lap of another complacent tourist.

Day two of the Boracay interlude on my next post!

Where Does Your Garden Grow?

I finally got that underwashing done today. The guys at the carwash had never seen anything like the underside of my car. The manager got four people working on it, one for every corner. Friendly bunch. They said I had been carrying enough dirt around to grow water lilies and swamp cabbage (kangkong po sa tagalog). I took a peek in the wheel recess when the work was done and I said...aaah, so that is what it's supposed to look like! Silly me, I always thought the underside of the car was supposed to look like blasted-on cement. Never would have realized it was petrified mud without the valuable assistance of the Kojak of car care (mabuhay po kayo). I also had the engine washed, and now it's so clean I can probably fry an egg over the engine block (not that I would ever want to).

Toodles, I am off to the beach till Tuesday the 10th.

Uh-oh.

It's my nephew Jakob's 3rd birthday on Sunday, and his parents are taking him to Boracay this weekend along with his grandmamma and Tita Bee (that's me). The last time I was anywhere near sun and sand was two years ago when I piled four friends into a borrowed van and took off for the private beach in Bantigue, where our quiet weekend was marred by the sudden onset of the rainy season, which then triggered a swarm of flying brown bugs that converged wherever there happened to be a lighted electric bulb.

Looks like my bad luck has risen to the occasion once again. Not only is my ankle still functioning below normal standards; I am presently dealing with a bad cough and often to be found hacking like I'm about to eject my tonsils onto the floor. Additionally, my sudden appetite for cheap msg-laden cheese rings and an unwillingness to answer text messages can mean only one thing; my period is just around the corner.

There goes any chance of sashaying out of the clear blue water a la Ursula Andress in Dr.No; or running along the shore a la Bo Derek in 10. All I see is me falling asleep on the beach after I've helped myself to enough cough syrup to fell a horse, and then waking up two hours later buried in the sand by a three-year old with a plastic trowel.

Like a Pillow on Wheels

After hemming and hawing since 2004, I finally got around to having the shock absorbers of my pokey but reliable little Toyota replaced (it has a name and it is Wigby). My mother had been at me for the past three years to get it done, but I balked at the expense, and I had gotten used to the thumping I would hear whenever I bounced on a pothole (loudness of thump directly proportional to size and depth of pothole). Over the years I realized that I couldn't hear the thump if I turned up the stereo, and probably everyone I've ever given a ride in my car will attest to having been subjected to listening to my Twisted Spinster cds at an uncomfortably loud volume. I am pleased to report that there will be a significant reduction in passenger torture, because the thumping is gone, and this was accomplished at a total cost of 10,800 buckers. I was ready to fork over the entire amount, but my mother very kindly footed half the bill (thanks Ma! Dinner's on me sometime this month), this being her week for a windfall at the nursing school she invested in. And I am not one to refuse a generous offer, unless it's coming from someone who wants something in exchange, like any of my major organs or running into a mall in nothing but my underwear.

Before letting me go, the mechanic gave me a talking-to about the state of my underchassis. It's coated with mud. Eight years worth of mud, to be exact, because it has never had an underwashing. He was also particularly bothered with the muck that was caught in the rubber trimming around the trunk, as well as the dust in the hidden corners of the doors. Very obsessive-compulsive, this mechanic. I wouldn't be surprised if that is how he had lost all his hair (he looks like Kojak, only whiter), by getting unduly worked up over his clients' minor sins in vehicle maintenance. But though I find him a tad overzealous with car care, I'm already pencilling in a underwash, engine wash and detailing for next week. If a little green Toyota now rides like a pillow on wheels, it ought to start looking like it does.

Driving Miss Crazy

Today it took me two hours to drive 12 circuitous kilometers to work. Everyone on the road was jerking forward about as fast as a fully-loaded carabao, advancing to their destination about 30 inches every 5 minutes. I would rather have turned back home and called in sick, but as it appeared that the entire population of Quezon City was on the streets this afternoon, I figured that I would be forty by the time I managed to roll into my garage. So I stayed on course and tried to delay the onset of road rage by listening to the new Maroon 5 album while leisurely pedestrians overtook my four-wheeled vehicle. I suppressed the urge to curse all the toxic ingredients of Metro Manila traffic -- idiot drivers (both public and private), Bayani's stupid u-turns and his blue-clad minions, nonexistent traffic lights in intersections that have tangled up every day for decades, tricycles that buzz around all over the place like uninvited flies in a picnic. Adam Levine yowls "so this is goodba-a-aye" and I see an opening appear in the UP Diliman/CP Garcia intersection...quick! Pedal to the metal and I am suddenly cut off by a Toyota pickup the color of infant diarrhea. Previously suppressed road rage boils out of every facial orifice, and I tear after him like heck. That wasn't easy to do, since I was behind the wheel of an 8-year old car with a pokey 1300cc engine and I was driving with a bad ankle. But tailgate that sonofa@%&#* I did, for the next ten minutes through choked Katipunan, until I had to turn right towards Xavierville and the schmuck in the pickup went straight on to the flyover. I don't have to guess that he didn't get very far before getting stuck in a major intersection without a traffic light, which may or may not have been manned by a single traffic aide with no life insurance. I arrived safely at work a quarter tank of gas, an additional hour and two dozen cuss words later.

Walk This Way

Since last saturday night, this is how I have had to walk: leaning to my left and dragging my right foot behind me, in an unintentional parody of the ultimate mad scientist's assistant that ever existed in fiction - Igor. I had gone to the courts with Doc Nikki (see picture at right -- hi dok!) to play a long-delayed game of badminton. I don't know whether I ought to place the blame on my shoes (red flags everywhere when I noticed that the sole felt suspiciously sticky on the rubber matting) or on the fact that it had been months since our last game and I was rustier than the bottom of a provincial ferry. We weren't five minutes into the game and hadn't even begun to sweat yet when I landed on the side of my foot and it twisted a full ninety degrees at the end of my leg. Mother@#%$*&# sh#@!!! I felt something pop, and then I fell to the floor in a wimpy, whiny mass of deathly pale flesh. My opponent, the good doctor, came and gingerly rotated the malfunctioned foot while I stared at it, bug-eyed with shock. It was a while before any feeling returned to the busted-up extremity, and I was led limping to the bleachers to have my ankle iced for twenty minutes with a hastily-borrowed icepack that smelled faintly of meat. Doc Nikki rotated my foot again to check for broken bones. I was reminded of Willoughby checking Marianne's twisted ankle in Jane Austen's "Sense and Sensibility", and so I blurted out "Too bad you aren't Zach Braff" (that I might have said 'James Bond', 'John Taylor', 'Adam Levine' or 'that bookstore bachelor rumored to be gay' is equally possible). The life I lead is dull enough that my mind is always ready to detect any opportunity for fantasy. I don't think I would have minded a trip to the hospital and some emergency surgery, if only for the remote possibility of being attended to by a good-looking, single, heterosexual ER doctor. Alas, Doc Nikki declared there would be no need to have me carried off on a stretcher.

My foot felt sore, but since I had no broken bones and I could still walk, nay, limp, I insisted that we resume the game. I played standing still most of the time, and hopped on my left leg if the ball went beyond the reach of my arm. I was determined not to let the 250 we were paying for the court go down the toilet. Today is Monday, and against the doc's advice to stay off my foot for a couple of days, I went to work. As a result of my stubbornness, my foot has swollen up. I now have a cankle (calf merged into ankle = cankle), and my foot is starting to turn green and purple. Yet I remain undaunted; the housework must be done, and so I continue to do the Igor shuffle. And now I think I hear the kettle calling. Coming, maaaaster!

Friday Night in the Armpit of Cubao

I can't recall the last time I went out on a Friday night. I stay at the office until half past ten adding up beansy numbers in a ledger, nose barely two inches away from the pages, wondering whether what looks like a zero is in fact a six, or if that seven is a one. Everyone else leaves at 7:00 to go home to their families or to go out somewhere fun. I stay shut in my 5x8 foot pigeonhole, listening to a radio station's 4-hour mix of pop music from twenty years ago.

Twice a week (sometimes thrice), I go to work at the family business; a drugstore my grandfather built up from scratch shortly after WWII. I used to work there full time, and used to make more than twice the peanuts I make now, until I went a little stir-crazy a couple of years ago. You would too, if you had front-row tickets to every squabble between family members fighting for their piece of the pie, losing their heads if someone gets an extra bite. It's not like it's a huge operation awash in megabucks. The main office sits in a dumpy building a stone's throw from a public market. If you manage to find a space to park your car along a sidestreet, your 5-minute walk to the office is sure to be an obstacle course, the obstacles being all of the following: dog poop, human piss, assorted garbage and at least two speeding tricycles driven by men with slightly more brains than a donut.

I'm not complaining. I'm just telling it like it is. I need this job, even if I like it like I like having a pus pimple in the center of my forehead. It's how I manage to pay the bills every month. It's how I manage to eat thrice a day. It's how I manage to get by when my other occupation presents zero profits in exchange for sleepness nights, which it often does. I'm a children's story writer. A good one, I suppose, if a couple of Palancas are proof enough of some talent. But not quite good enough to justify giving up the office job, and the smell that goes with it.

Death by Earwax

Last Saturday evening I was at the re-opening of a rock club that was immensely popular back in the nineties with angst-ridden college kids who liked to wear black. At the risk of sounding uncool, I will say this: I wasn't one of those kids. I was only there with Effie and Gay on the invitation of our friend the rock maiden, Nikki, whose med school colleague was playing bass guitar for one the bands. I did not pay for my P150 cover charge; Effie did, just to convince me to come along. She said it would be good for us to see something new. I had no idea what I was in for, and apparently, neither did she.

Barely three minutes into the performance of the first band of the night, there were only two thoughts running through my mind-- Paracetamol, and Oh God Get Me Out of Here. Forgive me for what must be a narrow embrace of the many varieties of music, but I did not enjoy having gibberish screamed at me while my eardrums were perforated by guitar-playing that was indistinguishable from the sound of a chainsaw. One singer's shriek was so high-pitched I thought he had laid an egg. Even if I had mercifully lost my hearing completely while they were trying to make the devil rise from hell, there was still the horror of having to look at the performers -- a bunch of pockmarked men in their forties (or possibly only in their thirties, but have been done in by all the booze, drugs, late nights, cigarettes and infrequent baths) in virtually the same black t-shirt and grimy jeans. And the hair, good lord in heaven. There was one band that featured two knuckleheads with hair past their shoulders (one poker-straight and layered, the other chaka khan frizzy), both of whom spent all their time on stage violently tossing their heads around, as if trying to detach them from their necks. I almost snorted beer up my nose; I thought it was hilarious. Every single number sounded exactly the same as the one before it, and for the life of me I could not tell what language the vocalist was singing in when he managed to keep his head still long enough to gargle something into the microphone.

We left the club at 1:00 in the morning. The immediate sensation as I walked out of the doors of that place was not unlike having one's head inside a goldfish bowl. Transient deafness. Coupled with the feeling that my soul had been sucked out through my ears. But I regained normal hearing when the club was two hundred yards behind us, and somehow my soul must have escaped through a crack in the heavy red doors. Not for me, this insane metal and hard rock. If there really is music underneath all that noise, I'm pretty certain I don't belong to the breed that can hear it.

Die, sucker, die!!!

Cockroaches. I hate them more than I hate thieves, litterbugs, politicians, the E-vat, blocked facial pores and the songs of David Pomeranz. Living alone means I cannot yodel for my mother when I find an ugly bug in the kitchen; she won't be here to take one slipper off and whack the living daylights out of it. Living alone means I cannot shriek like a banshee and have my six-foot-tall brother-in-law come running to smack a heavy shoe against a roach that has crawled far up the wall. What I have is a great big can of Raid, an inordinate fear of insects with wings and hairy legs, and a dash of murderous intent. Panic will make me empty half the contents of the canister to kill a single cockroach, and it will only occur to me afterwards, when I start to feel a little light-headed, that the air is so thick with chemicals that you can probably strike a match and make the room explode.

A great big thank you to my brilliant sister Steph [who married the six-foot-tall brother-in-law, and is also deathly afraid of roaches (It must be genetic)] -- she drew the cartoon you see above. HYAAAAK! Death to the creepy-crawlies.

Just eat it.

One of the first things that I had to learn quickly when I skedaddled out of my mother's house was to get unused to having my meals prepared for me. At my place, there is no well-stocked GE refrigerator or a cook manning the kitchen. What I have is a weeny little Samsung fridge that's four feet tall and often has hardly anything in it apart from water, tired vegetables and cheap cuts of meat. Sometimes I will pity myself and buy a bit of steak, but that means cutting back on other household supplies, like toilet paper, for instance. This is how I know it's possible, with utmost concentration, to blow one's nose or wipe one's privates on two squares of toilet paper.

As I still have a little more than a week to go before I can take a trip to the supermarket (so the charges on my credit card will be billed in July), I am in a period of creative starvation. This means I am now making meals out of whatever meat is still in residence in my frost-covered freezer, and the wilted veggies in the bottom shelf. Today I made a stew out of beef that used to be red but had lately turned brown, and tossed in baguio beans that were more yellow than green. Tomorrow I intend to dice a badly-wrinkled carrot into a meatball soup. Ick.