High School Reunion

Our friend Steph came home from the US after an absence of eight years, and we got the old barkada together for dinner at Kalye Juan last month. These were the people I had countless recesses and lunches with, sitting on the pebbled floor of the Maryknoll High School cafeteria. We always ran out of tables because we always meandered on our way to the dining hall. It's a wonderful thing to be grown up and properly seated for every meal. Upper left: Effie. Upper right: Steph. Lower right: Yumi. Lower left: the twisted spinster.

Out, damn spot!

Now that my half-hearted Palanca entry has been shipped off to McKinley Road and crossed off my to-do list, I can refocus my attentions to the pitiful state of my fugly face. Have you ever heard of rosacea? Pretty name for an incurable skin condition that gives you a permanent flush on cheeks, nose and forehead. As it progresses, the flushed areas will begin to bloom with lumps and bumps that look like acne but will react to any standard acne medication by calling on all its friends and relatives to start a bloody revolution. When I went to visit my brother six months ago in November, the weird Melbourne weather triggered one of the worst flare-ups I've ever had, and since coming back home to QC my face has been one scary sight to behold. Some days it looks so bad that I imagine people wonder whether I'm contagious. I wish I could just stay home during the day because I am hideous in broad daylight, but if I don't go to work I'll starve, so I comb my hair over my face, Sadako-style, and avoid looking anybody in the eye at all costs. Never mind if it makes me look like a lunatic.

There is no medication or dermatological procedure that can rid me of it. The best a derma can do is to prescribe an antibiotic to control the inflammation or zap your face with a laser to temporarily shrink the blood vessels. Antibiotics stopped working for me a long time ago, and as for the laser treatments, I'm not too sure about frying my face, and neither am I in a position to drop a few thousand for each session. It takes a long time for a simple scratch to fade on skin like mine. The scar I got under my knee when I fell off a bike in fifth grade is still as nasty as it ever was.

Nobody in the dermatological profession has any idea what causes rosacea. Yet. So people like me can only look to the world wide web for answers, and for the sympathy of fellow-sufferers. Forums abound with remedies for rosacea, the latest of which comes from an e-book being hawked over the net for twenty-nine dollars. Some people bought it out of desperation, and then sprung the info out on the forums to save the others from having to fork out any more money. Here is what we must start taking to rid ourselves of the plague: lysine supplements, yogurt, cider vinegar, omega-3, HCl supplements and Zinc. What we have is an amino acid deficiency and a digestion problem, the book says.

Well, no harm in conducting a two-week experiment. I tracked down pure lysine tablets at the GNC in Trinoma (but not before getting lost in the rabbit warren that is this godawfully large mall), bought a supply of fish for the omega-3, stocked my refrigerator with probiotic/yogurt drinks, and have temporarily stopped drinking coffee in favor of green tea, though it isn't on the list. I hear it's good for the skin. So far I haven't had an adverse reaction to popping lysine tablets before every meal, and though the yogurt drink tastes like soured milk mixed with the juice of an unripe fruit, I drink it anyway. Green tea, without sugar, tastes really green. Like grass.

A Message from Mao

You gotta hand it to the universe. Just when you're an inch away from opening fire with a semiautomatic on your unsuspecting neighbors because you've been stuck all month in the longest April Fools Day of your entire life, the universe will send its unlikeliest messenger to tighten the screw even more. An errand to Shoppersville supermarket to get a harmless dory fillet, orange juice and a few articles of junk food. But first a short trip to the second floor to browse for a trinket or two; palliatives for the blues. I see a nice-looking purse that might have possibilities. Turn it from side to side, wondering whether anyone in his right mind would buy a bag from the second floor of a supermarket for two grand. Walk away, becks, walk away, yelled a tiny voice inside my head, the very same one that sings disco tunes whenever I make a deposit at the bank. Tsk.

So I wandered around the shelves of office supplies. Staplers...erasers...ooh,a battery-operated pencil sharpener...aha, stationery! I've always had a thing for paper. So I flip through a box of letter sets made in Korea. They're cute, in spite of being peppered with english captions that make absolutely no sense at all, even if each word manages to be spelled correctly. Flip flip flip. Here's one with a picture of a log cabin in the snow. Here's one with a cartoon character holding a giant lighted mosquito coil, yelling in Korean at a mosquito at the bottom of the page. Flip flip. Here's one with...what the f...Mao Zedong? But so it is. Chairman Mao's stingy smile and generous forehead on a 100-renminbi bill is the design on the envelope, and it's duplicated on the matching paper, with something extra: these two lines from a very familiar song appears on the upper left hand corner, rendered in a cursive black font just under Mao's chin -

All by myself, don't wanna be all by myself.
All by myself, don't want to live all by myself.


Well, get in line, mister Mao, get in line. You know you're beyond salvation when a dead revolutionary leader sings the anthem.

Binibining Palengke

For the past nine years I've gone to work at the drugstore's main office that's located right next to a public market which I've never bought anything from until, oh, around two weeks ago. I didn't need to do the food shopping when I still lived at my mom's house, but I certainly could have done my shopping at the market when I moved out three years ago, right? I don't know, it didn't seem to be such a good idea whenever I staggered out of my cubicle at somewhere past 10 PM. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of there and fix dinner.

For the longest time, I bought my vegetables in pre-packed plastic bags from the supermarket. 7 times out of ten there would be a fat worm in one of the eggplants, small larvae sleeping in the cabbage, or a hairy green thing in the pechay. I didn't realize what a bad deal I was getting until I wandered into the veggie area of Nepa Qmart to get two eggplants and some beans. I thought the man was joking when he charged me seven pesos. If this were the supermarket in my neighborhood I would have been forking out more than twice as much money. Which means I have been willingly letting myself get fleeced for the past three years. Aaaargh! I'm a stupid broad, that's what I am.

I clocked out of the office at 10 PM this evening and went straight to my usual vegetable dealer for the usual beans, potatoes, eggplants and a chayote. I made friends with a six-year old boy who pretended to be manning the stall; he called a green pepper an eggplant. I went along with it. He charged me twenty-eight pesos for everything, until his father came along, hauled the boy aside and weighed the vegetables. Forty pesos.

It says on my watch that it's 12:18 am, Sunday. Happy Easter!

Deadline Fever

I'm supposed to be working on a story to submit to the 2009 Palancas before the end of the month, but here I am listening to a funk/house version of The Smiths' "Stop Me", nursing a stomach ache from eating too many cheetos with my coffee, blogging. It's the first time in weeks that I haven't been sent a translation job, the perfect opportunity to spend one full day on earnest work for the contest closest to my heart, but for some reason I could only manage to tap out two and a half paragraphs and get as far as page three of what may end up a seven-page manuscript. The rest of my day I spent dawdling over my email, catching up on the news via Yahoo, watching the first half of 50 First Dates while drying my hair, daydreaming about a man in a blue shirt and a white coat, fiddling with the budget (yay! I'm in the black) and defrosting the refrigerator. Who knows, maybe I can muster enough activity in my lump of fungus for a brain to cobble two more paragraphs before I lose consciousness this evening, and thereby hook a finger into page four. It's only 10:58 PM anyway, and there's time yet to spend in front of this machine. But first, dinner (the holy week staple of chicken afritada swimming in tomato broth), and then a small stack of paperwork from the office. And then it's the Palancas all the way till 2AM. I swear. Unless there's something interesting on Youtube.

Sammy: In Memoriam, 1998-2009

REST IN PEACE, SAMMY-SAM.

Somebody Kill Me Now 2

Saturday. Two thirty-four in the morning. Spent nine hours locked in a windowless 5x10 office trying to make sense out of sales reports that seemed to have been made while under the influence of weed, navigating my way through a stack of invoices and checks needing my john hancock, and punching numbers into a geriatric calculator to figure out whether we've got enough money to tide us over through next week. The boss is away on vacation until the end of the month, and so is the second-in-command. Any work that those two couldn't pre deep-six now gets shunted over to me and I am so glad for the extra work that it's perfectly fine that I have to come in for an extra day every week. NOT. I feel like I've just been kicked into the fireplace by the two ugly stepsisters. It gets worse. I'm not even Cinderella, I really am just the scullery maid. If you cleaned me up and stuffed me into a padded ball gown and my feet into glass slippers, I'd still be fugly. Worse yet? The prince is really only interested in the shoes.


Thou shalt love Mark Ronson, if there's nobody else.