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.