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.

Oh my god, I think I've missed my boat.

This is me, becky bravo, age 35. Not a bad-looking old bag, if I may say so myself, but still painfully single. It's been two presidents ago since I last had a date, and in about five months I'll be turning another year older. The probability of my having a miraculous vision of the Virgin Mary while I'm washing a dinner plate is far more likely than accomplishing a change in my civil status before my ovaries wrinkle up like raisins. Am I even doing anything about it? No. Far too lazy to ask around for a date, far too shy to speak to the few interesting men I meet, and far too doubtful of getting lucky if I search for men in cyberspace. If I ever do meet THE man and get a ring on my finger, it'll have to be by heavenly intervention; the finger of God.
But in case it's not on His agenda to fix me up, I'm learning how to get by on my own. I'm a spinster in training.