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.