Eyebag Electrocution

I had the last of my three-for-two acne/peeling treatments last Thursday. The last part of the procedure, the "fun part" (to quote Dr. Addie), in which the dermatologist takes a swabful of a mysterious acid from an amber bottle (probably three parts muriatic acid and one part Zonrox bleach) and wipes it all over your freshly punctured face, had me squealing in pain while the stuff burned into my pores. Holy mother of god, I can think of a lot of other things that are less excruciating. Broken ankle. Typhoid fever. Accidentally hooking your tongue on the sharp part of your braces. Molar extraction!

During the pre-surgery facial, the "easy part" (skin brushing, t-zone suction, clay mask, steaming, the works), the attendant talked me into getting a "galvanic" eyebag treatment for an extra hundred bucks. I agreed to have it without even knowing how it was done, and it was too late to back out when she handed me an ominous metal rod, which I was supposed to hold in my right hand while she repeatedly ran over my eyelids another metal rod shaped like a Y with rounded ends, through which coursed a small electric charge. What voltage was involved, I never thought to ask. I just screamed inside my head and tried not to think of burning flesh while I felt the weird prickly sparks coming from the metal touching my eyelids. I can't tell whether the procedure had any effect at all. Perhaps one needs more than one session to have appreciable results. I'm not doing all that again, though, because it was too much like voluntarily standing next to an electric pole in a lightning storm. The next time I feel like zapping my eyebags, maybe I'll just pour water under the refrigerator, take my slippers off and grab the handle.

Post-procedure Frankenstein face notwithstanding, I went directly to the department store to shop for a tank top. Felt a little self-conscious and tried to cover my face with my hair. I might have lost my nerve to hang around if it hadn't been for a really cool jacket that caught my eye. Had to have it. Also had to have three different tank tops in white, beige and black. I'm putting the cart before the horse here, but I'll bet they'll look good with my new face :)

Peelings...nothing more than peelings...

Day eight under dermatological treatment, and I am now in ecdysis, molting like an anaconda in the middle of summer. I'm avoiding looking in the mirror to keep myself from picking the peeling skin off my face with my fingers. I'm under explicit instructions from the doctor not to do anything of the sort or I might end up with patchy brown spots on my brand-new face. I certainly don't want that to happen, especially since the new face has been paid for in advance.

Someone at the office thought the scabs from last Thursday's procedure were some sort of contagious growth. She also wanted to know whether my face hurt because it was so red. I did my best to focus on the growing pile of accursed paperwork on my desk, but it was difficult, because...holy cow, yes, my face did hurt. It felt like the skin on my face was two sizes too tight for my head. If squashing your stomach into a godawful pair of skinny jeans so tight you can trace your kidneys in them is an uncomfortable experience, then imagine, if you will, jamming your entire head into an ankle sock until your eyeballs are relocated to the bottom of your chin. That was exactly how my face felt just before the epidermis cracked up and started peeling off in skinny white flakes.

I've just come home from my second prep 'em-prick 'em-acid wash 'em treatment, and this time it hurt a few degrees less than my first time at Dr. Addie's torture chamber. I suppose it was because she already killed off the principal zits last week. Today's post-derma face was also less scary than last week's halloween mask of pits and rashes, and instead of a flaming post acne-surgery purple, it was rather more like lilac.

Man, the horrors we're willing to endure for beauty. This had better (freaking) work.

Nonstop Rickrolling, Yadda yadda yadda, and Buying a New Face

If there isn't already a poster boy for graceful aging, then Rick Astley is the man for that job. How does he do it? In 1987 he was 21 years old, but he looked more like a 14-year old boy (minus acne). Today he is 42 but looks hardly 35 (minus male pattern baldness and a beer gut). I'd like to know what the man eats. I'd like to know whether the youthful looks are in his genes and whether the rest of his family is also immune to gravity. I'd like to know whether he stays indoors during the day and has no reflection when he looks in the mirror. Gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous. I know I've already used that word to describe John Taylor, but I must now take the word back and give it to the person who owns it. Ricky Astley...what a babe.

My sincerest thanks to Renny, who, in the afternoon preceding the Rick concert, said she had a surprise for me, and shoved a cdr into my hand. I didn't get a chance to check it out until two days ago. If I had known earlier that I'd been given the Rick Astley mother lode, I'd have put myself on nonstop 12-inch Rickroll by the stroke of midnight August 2. Better late than never, though, and the sole playlist getting any airtime lately on my iTunes is "The Ultimate Rickroll" -- 57.4 minutes of Rick Astley in extended remixes. Man, it takes me back to the "Rumors" years, when an older cousin used to bring us younger kids along to the disco on his saturday nights home from PMA. He was well into college and the rest of us were still in high school. I was probably 16, and I remember jumping up and down at the first few notes of Never Gonna Give You Up and just begging to dance. ( On a side note, I also remember having my teenage curiosity piqued by deejay John Robinson, who hid his face behind RayBans even in the dead of night. Of course my 16-year old self thought that was cool. I didn't know until I was much older that he wore them to cover up a lazy eye. Oh well.)

Who knows how long my Rick Astley mania is going to last? Maybe until a concert promoter books "Tears for Fears" and Roland Orzabal sallies into town with that pout of his. But for now, the man of the hour has got to be the boy in the suit. I'm still so into him that I will even go so far as blurting out his name while I am engaged in an informal dialogue in a classroom full of college students.
I was at the UP College of Ed just last Thursday as Teacher Portia's guest speaker at the Reading Room. I was there to talk about being a writer of children's fiction. Nothing fancy; the kids throw you questions, you answer, voila. I'm always nervous and fidgety when I have to speak in front of strangers, but I figure that if I keep on doing it anyway, I might get better at it. Last Thursday's engagement marked my third stab at public discourse, with the result being that there are 40 more people in Quezon City who think I am a lunatic. However, I think I may reassure myself that my lunacy was well-tolerated last Thursday, as the card that came with the cake (a token for my hour-long yapping) was filled with very encouraging notes from the students. And if I may quote from one of those notes, one person called me "effortlessly cool"... why thank you kindly, that's the nicest thing anyone's said about me in a while. Another note just below that one says I am "sabog"... but in a good way!
At what point during my fabulous display of verbal incontinence did I blurt out the name Rick Astley? Well, one of the students asked about my husband. I confess that I don't even recall what the question was. All I remember is the yelp that came flying out of my mouth the second I caught the words "your husband", and my speedy declaration that I didn't have one. I immediately went on to say (for reasons yet unknown) that if I were to marry someone, I'd like him to be someone from UP. I ought to have stopped there, but (for reasons directly attributable to mental illness), I appended this gem to the end of that sentence: unless he happens to be Rick Astley. So shoot me. I may be thirty-six but I'm still a slave to my glands. For lack of a proper man at whom to toss my hormones, I gladly hurl them at the beautiful Ageless One.

Which brings us back to the question. How does he stay so young-looking? Seeing how little he has changed in twenty years made me look at my own face. Shudder. I could look so much better if I got rid of all these spots and did something to close up the pores that make me look like Joey de Leon. So I've snipped off the damned purse strings and am buying myself a new face. Get three facial/peeling treatments for the price of two till the end of August! I had my first one today, and let me tell you. Beauty hurts. First I had to sit through a procedure involving a metal prod punching into my face until it was raw and bleeding, and then I had to endure two doses of a solution that stung so badly that I wouldn't have been surprised if they said they were trying to melt my entire face off my head. It might have been less painful if they had sprayed my face with gasoline and set it on fire. I'm covered in scabs, and will again subject myself to facial torture two more times before the month is over. Ouch. Damn Rick Astley and his face that's frozen in time.

Rick Meets Dick!

OH, WHO GIVES A FART ABOUT JOHN TAYLOR ANYMORE. Rick Astley sings, plays drums and guitar, is five years younger AND doesn't need cow poison in his face. Last Friday, August 1, my friends and I, undeterred by rainy weather, trooped to the Araneta Coliseum to see the man who charmed us all, twenty-odd years ago, with his baby face, too-big suit and squeaky-clean dance music. Rick Astley, now 42 and a father of one, finally came to see us twenty-odd years late. He's barely altered except perhaps for ten pounds and a different haircut. His voice is as deep as it ever was. Ten seconds into "Together Forever" and it was just like we were giddy high school girls all over again.



Renny, Nikki, Effie, Gay and I were (regrettably) too cheap to spare the cash for better seats, so we ended up slumming in General Admission, where there aren't any seats at all; just crumbling cement steps functioning as both seat and floor. We were so high up that the sound was awful, and Rick was all of two inches tall to the naked eye, but that didn't stop us from dancing like heathen women and screaming "I love you!" every ten minutes (okay, that was just me). It was a very good thing that I remembered to borrow my brother-in-law's binoculars or I would not have had the pleasure of discovering that Rick Astley was wearing Adidas sneakers with his black suit and skinny tie, that he kept sipping from a coffee cup in between songs, and that he hasn't any sort of tummy flab one would normally expect in a man in his forties (what a babe).



There were two people in the audience marked by fate to have a close encounter with the man that night. The first was Gina, handpicked by Rick to sing "My Arms Keep Missing You" with him (it helped that she was in his face from the very start of the show, obstinately snapping pictures from a corner of the stage). Her voice was barely audible and the pitch was perhaps too low for a woman, but she carried on admirably, and was well-rewarded with a kiss, a bear hug, and her right hand on Rick's left buttock. I would have sold my liver to take her place on that stage. There's one question I'm dying to ask Gina - does the man smell good? I imagine he must smell like fresh laundry. Or cookies fresh out of the oven.


Lucky person number two? Rick's number one fan in the Philippines - Roderick Paulate ! He got to sing along on stage for the encore, "Never Gonna Give You Up". I'll bet neither Rick nor the concert organizers imagined that Kuya Dick would end up singing almost the entire song AND dancing all over the stage like a wayward chorus member in a dance musical for an entire shocking minute. God bless Dick Paulate, he recognized the chance of a lifetime, and he gave it his all. Thanks to Roderick, here's one more thing Rick Astley is never gonna do... he's never gonna forget us now.

(Stars In My Eyes) Duranmanyakis !

As it turns out, in addition to the four thousand, four hundred and ten big ones I spent on my patron seat ticket to Duran Duran, I dropped several grand more on concert-related incidentals -- haircut and color, hypoallergenic face powder, eye drops (for eyes bloodshot from rosacea and lack of sleep), two light cure treatments at the dentist, a pair of bop-friendly wedge sandals, and a pre-concert dinner for me and Renny at Italianni's. I am likely to punish myself for the previous month's bout of overspending by living like a caveman for the next couple of weeks, but in exchange for the supernatural sensation produced by standing within 15 feet of John Taylor's presence, I am equal to the sacrifice. What care I for food when there is such a man?




Last Thursday evening, April 10th, Renny and I went to see Duran Duran at the Araneta Coliseum for the Red Carpet Massacre concert, which comes nineteen years after their last appearance in this part of the world - the Big Thing gig in 1989. When you haven't seen a beloved friend in an agonizingly long time, you'll want to look your best when he comes, and you want to be prepared for any surprises. Renny and I pulled out all the stops and arrived at the Araneta center in full battle gear, glammed up from head to toe, each standing two inches taller in newly-purchased footwear, and each carrying enough hardware for an African safari. Aside from our digital cameras and video-capable phones, we each carried binoculars, the better to see the very pores of the band members' faces. You must already have inferred that I was primarily concerned with John's, but in Renny's case, it was Roger Taylor's pores that were of utmost interest.



It was nearly 10:00 p.m. when Duran Duran finally took the stage, and from the moment I laid my eyes on John, I kept shrieking like I was falling from a building with a hundred thousand floors. What a hot, hot, hot 47-year old man. I recall hardly anything about what the rest of the several thousand-strong audience did that night; I only know that for most of the show my eyes followed John Taylor as he jogged from one side of the stage to the other, for all the world as if I were watching a Wimbledon tennis match. I am stunned by how good he looks for a man his age, and it's a huge mystery to me why he appears so wrinkled in pictures when he looks hardly over forty in person. My brother says it's botox, but I refuse to think the great Juan had a face full of cow poison that night. All I care to think about is that he was here and he was real.



Like the responsible Duranies that we were, Renny and I never sat down during the show (except once during Ordinary World, immediately following especially strenuous gyrating required by Planet Earth, and even then it was just to catch our breath before standing right up again). Even when most people chose to sit out all the Red Carpet Massacre songs, we remained on our feet, shimmying to Nite Runner and Skin Divers. All the true Duranies gave their all for every song, not the least of whom were the new friends we made that night; Salvador, who gleefully pantomimed the lyrics of The Reflex, and Nancy, who is such a huge Simon fan that she had a poster made to proclaim her undying love ("Simon, I want you more!").



Once in a while I tore my eyes away from the bass man to see what Simon was up to. I especially enjoyed seeing him do his New Religion dance and the opening high kick for The Reflex. I honestly never liked the song, but just for that evening I thought it was brilliant. Can't argue when you've got the entire coliseum singing the refrain. And what about the Wild Boys? I dislike it even more than the Reflex, but as soon as I recognized the drum line, I went properly nuts like everybody else. All Roger Taylor had to do was twirl his drumstick during the song, and Renny and I squealed simultaneously, half a dozen times for half a dozen consecutive twirls, like trained animals in a weird Pavlov experiment. Renny says she can't remember having had the good fortune of witnessing such unprecedented twirling, and maintains that she only remembers seeing him twirl twice. But I'm fairly certain of having seen the aforementioned twirl buffet, so I must conclude that the sensory overload was just too much for Renny's brain, so to protect her from spontaneously bursting into flames (Roger Taylor standing in same country + Renny's raging hormones + tropical summer + gratuitous drumstick twirling = a mysterious coliseum conflagration), it went on a temporary coma until Roger was finished delivering the goods. Thus the Araneta Center was saved from disaster.



The entire Araneta audience practically took over the job of singing Save a Prayer. It got so we couldn't really hear Simon's voice over the microphone anymore; and instead of Duran Duran performing the song for us, we sang it to them. John was appreciative enough to say exactly this after the tumult had died down at last: "Well, that was good. We should come back here more often." You can imagine what a whole lot of yelling that brought on. I thought I was going to pass out from joy. Now I know that musicians are bound to say stuff like that to get the audience going, but if there was even a tiny bit of truth there, I'd be extremely happy to have them back here soon, because I didn't get to close my eyes and isolate the bass line in Girls on Film. And I didn't pay enough attention to Nick. And they didn't sing (sacrilege!) Careless Memories or Is There Something I Should Know! Are they coming back?? Please please tell us now!!!



It's been more than a week since they left, but we're still in Duranie heaven.

Good Afritada Friday

You're supposed to fast on Good Friday, meaning you're expected to get by on one small meal the entire day and offer up the suffering that is growling, light-headed hunger as your Holy Week sacrifice. If food were one of those things that just by being itself turns our attention away from God, then perhaps I would not have broken the rules today. I've heard some people argue that an empty stomach helps one to hear God better when they're meditating, but I really can't see how that's possible. When you're hungry, all you can think about is that you're hungry. I am reminded of one Good Friday long ago, as an adolescent waaaaay back in the eighties, when my two siblings and I and a cousin from next door spent all day sitting around the dinner table, staring at a large metal pot filled with chicken macaroni salad. We were waiting for 3pm to strike; the hour that Jesus is supposed to have taken his last breath. I can't remember who decreed that we could not eat the macaroni before 3pm (in addition to not taking a bath) or suffer the unknown consequences of disrespecting the suffering Christ, but I do remember that we followed;no questions asked, no protestations bared. Every now and then one of us would lean over the pot, open the lid and inhale deeply. Really deeeeply. The elders exhorted us to go pray quietly somewhere or offer our services at the neighborhood "pabasa" (by that time the use of mikes and speakers to broadcast the manang's voice to the entire barangay was already in popular use), but none of us did anything of the sort. All we could think really think about was raiding that pot. When 3pm rolled around, there was only one thing on our minds. Thank God for macaroni. If fasting didn't move me to spiritual enlightenment then, it surely doesn't now. Personally, I feel more attuned to God's presence when I'm free to eat my three meals a day and thank him for it from the bottom of my heart.

Assessment: Ex-Smoker

I went to see my pulmonologist on Tuesday afternoon for the monthly check-up of my progress with Champix. Let's call him Dr. Turtlehead, shall we, because he always comes amazingly late. I was at his clinic at 2pm and he didn't show up till 4:30. By the time my name was called, my ass was the shape of the plastic chair I had been sitting in for the past two and a half hours. The woman patient who was ahead of me in line was cursing under her breath and probably would have tried to kill the doctor if someone had handed her a weapon. I didn't feel that I had as much cause to complain because Dr. Turtlehead sees me for free (he used to share a clinic with my mother at VRP, but let it not be said that I'm a complete leech -- I've been giving him gifts in exchange for being "NC" (that's 'no charge' to you), the last of which was a bottle of civet coffee).

Anyhoo, this is what it says now in my medical record at Dr.Turtlehead's office: "assessment: ex-smoker". Tuesday afternoon was my final day on Champix. I was on it these past three months, and excepting one incident of smoking six cigarettes on a single day last December, I've been clean and nicotine-free so far. I'm not entirely confident that I can resist the urge to smoke now that I've gone off the drug, but I can't say that I'm not relieved that I don't have to pop another of those vile blue tablets. They gave me terrible nausea. Worse than being in a carnival ride that repeatedly hangs you upside down until you toss your cookies. I guess I'll just have to trust that I've had enough of a mind-fix to know better than to throw three whole months of good behavior away.

I think about cigarettes a whole lot less than I used to. I used to wake up in the morning with the first thought in my head being "coffee and a smoke". These days I hardly ever remember that cigarettes even exist, and only recall that there are such things when I happen to see someone having a puff while walking down the street, sucking his cheeks in, purple lips making an "o" to exhale poison smoke. I never would have thought it possible, but I cringe at the thought that I used to look that way, and that I thought it was cool! Holy cow, the things nicotine does to your head.

Now that I don't think about Marlboros anymore, I spend all this freed-up head space thinking about food. Particularly cake, cheeseburgers and fries, pizza, green curry chicken, and the fishballs at Yakal dorm. Couple of nights ago I dreamt I was looking at the display case of a cake shop and writing names of pastry on a list. Even my subconscious wants food. Got chow? Gimme.

12 Again on April 10

My friend Renny is the biggest Duran Duran fan in the Philippines. She hasn't stopped fantasizing about drummer Roger Taylor since 1981 (guess who the bigger spinster is?). I had a thing for bassist John Taylor from age eleven through thirteen, and then quite forgot all about it. I didn't even remember going to the "Big Thing" concert at Araneta in 1989(?), until Renny showed me the pictures of us seated in the patron box with my sister and their good friend Olivia. There I was indeed, in my light-colored jeans and white Tretorns. Once upon a time I was a Duranie!

A couple of Christmases ago, Renny gave me a dvd of the band's 2004 comeback concert at Wembley. I didn't expect to be caught up in nostalgia for the long-gone eighties, and I certainly didn't think I'd find any of the members worth looking at now that they were well into their forties and likely to be sporting wrinkles and beer guts. But whaddya know, I enjoyed that dvd and watched the whole thing from start to finish. By the time the end credits were rolling, I'd begun to think that the band sounded even better than they did twenty years ago. And they looked good, too, for a bunch of old farts in their forties. John Taylor's got more lines on his forehead than a sheet of Size1 paper, but he's still a good-looking guy.

Thanks to Renny's obsessive trolling of the internet for concert info, I have now been roped into our simultaneous purchase of two front-section tickets, paid more than a month in advance, to the "Red Carpet Massacre" concert at the Araneta on April 10. Total madness, but I intend to exhaust all four thousand, four hundred and twenty reasons to be twelve again, and mad about the bassist with the beautiful smile.

Oi, Renny! This concert had better be good or I'll be swinging it over your head for the rest of your natural life :)