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.