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.