Tears For Fears in Manila : I Wish I Were That Red Guitar

May 1, Saturday , 7 AM : Met Renny and my sister for jalking at the UP Oval. Set my iPod on my "Tears For Fears: The Sun and the Moon" playlist in anticipation of the duo's arrival. Best TFF tunes for running: 'Broken' and 'Mothers Talk'. Pre-concert preparations already under way; Renny painted her toenails a lurid pink before heading off to UP, and I reported that I was ready to dye my hair "dark golden blond" after the jalk.

11:30 AM : Got to work with the blond dye job after having a toast-and-coffee breakfast, watering the parched plants on my windowsill and doing the laundry. Yosh! Combed half the bottle of acrid red-brown goo onto my head, steeling myself for the unknown outcome. An extreme color experiment in Roland Orzabal's honor! Decided to wait the full thirty minutes of developing time.

12:30 PM : Showered, shampooed and conditioned. Nervously dried hair in front of fan. What the????? I want my money back! I'm nowhere near blond at all!

Sunday, May 2, 8 AM : Sent confirmation message to Vicky, Effie, Gay and Renny re 6PM dinner at the Gateway Pizza Hut Bistro. Got out of bed to make breakfast and get my concert equipment together: special sun-and-moon pendant, black shirt, short skirt, sneakers, binoculars and fully-charged camera. Stereo plays TFF cd in continuous loop all morning.

12:30 PM : Headed for Escaler to have lunch. Mother asks whether I am coming with them to attend the Noynoy rally on Edsa. My apologetic grin immediately followed by excited twittering about the concert that I wouldn't miss for absolutely anything. Cousin Iam drops by to try to convince me again to change my mind about accompanying her on a free trip to Boracay. I declined, and gamely tried to think of other people she could invite, but by then half of me was already flying over the Araneta Center.

2:30 PM : Killed time by watching "Death Note 2". Had a drink of genmai-cha to calm my jumpy stomach.

5:00 PM : Renny arrives. I brush my teeth, change into my concert clothes, and walk into a fresh spray of cologne. "Death Note 2" viewing left unfinished. We drive off to Cubao.

5:30 PM : Guards holding "FULL" signs in front of all the Gateway and Coliseum parking entrances. Lines of cars idling at the ticket booths. Quickly decided to get valet parking, never mind the cost. We got out of the car at the drop-off, and the affable head valet attendant handed me a ticket.

VALET: "Ma'am, matatagalan tayo mamaya ha, pagkuha ninyo ng kotse. Ang dami kasing nagpapa-valet simula kaninang twelve pa.

BECKS: "Hmm? E bakit?"

VALET (giving me a funny look) : "Ma'am hindi ba kayo manonood ng concert?"

BECKS: "Ay, okey lang yun. E di magkakape nalang muna kami."

VALET: "Hehe, ma'am baka yun din ang gawin nung iba."

Oh, all right, so it was pretty obvious that I belonged to the aging generation that waited twenty five years to finally see this band perform live. I took the valet's arrow out of my chest,

and we hotfooted it to the restaurant.

6:30 PM: Vicky arrives just as Renny and I are about to dig into our Carbonara pan pizza. She orders a pasta dish, and then gives us pasalubong chocolates from her trip to Kuala Lumpur. I saved my stash for later while Renny (always with most abysmal EQ when it comes to chocolate) dug right into hers after polishing off her pizza.

7:10 PM: Simultaneous arrival of Gay and Effie. Prohibited from ordering any dinner as it would make us late for the show.

BECKS: Hey Gay, are you Roland, or are you Curt?

GAY: Ah, which one is which ba? (guffaws from the Diwatas)

BECKS: The cute one is Curt. Roland is the sexy one.

GAY: Si Roland yung kulot ang buhok, diba? Kay Curt ako.

Why am I the only one who thinks Roland is hot? What is WRONG with you all? ("What's wrong with YOU?" Effie says back (she used to sign her notes "Effie Smith" back in high school). Absolutely nothing. Curt might have had the pretty face, but Roland's was infinitely more interesting. And the boy could dance! Boing!

7:40 PM: Fought our way through crowds of people in their thirties to get to our seats in Upper Box 321. Everyone saw someone they knew from high school, and the atmosphere in the Coliseum was like a giant class reunion. Squirmed, whined and fidgeted in my seat. Come on, I'm dying here! Start the show! Cute guy squeezes past us with his date and I wasn't completely out of my mind not to notice that he was rather a dish (and can he possibly be OUR age?), but unfortunately (for him, that is) I was saving my attention for some other man that night.

8:15 PM: Sandwich takes the stage. I guess they won the coin toss with Pupil as to which band would perform first. Raimund Marasigan manages to get the audience on its feet with excellent covers of Cure hits. Ely Buendia comes out to sing "Alapaap" and gets a rise out of the crowd, but by the time his own band Pupil starts their set, nobody's listening anymore. Disadvantageous position made even worse by their singing songs from their new album, which no one cared to listen to that night. In a likely fit of frustration, drummer tosses drumsticks on the floor after a tom-tom duet with the second guitarist, and second guitar guy kicks his drum over at the end of the song. Who cares? Bring out Roland and Curt!

Sometime way past 9 PM (I was too far gone to remember) : After the eternity that the TFF crew took to set up the instruments, the house lights were finally turned down. The arena was packed right up to the rafters, and the whoop that rang through the place when the boys finally appeared was probably loud enough to be heard as far as Tawi-tawi. They open with a short portion of Mad World and segue into Everybody Wants to Rule the World, and every single soul in the audience sings along with them. (I got my hands on a video taken by a friend's friend who was sitting in the patron box, and the look on Roland's face is priceless. We gave them the exact same reception they would have gotten from us twenty-five years ago when they were at the height of their popularity.)

Was I the chick shrieking "aaaah! I love you, I love you!" in the background of this video? I honestly do not know. Might have been me, might have been any of my friends. I lost control of myself the second I heard Roland sing. Oh, that voice! That voice! I can't be held responsible for anything I did that night that was beyond the limits of propriety or sanity.

They sang a great selection of songs from almost all the TFF albums (even the ones where Curt was no longer part of the band). Memories Fade, Sowing the Seeds of Love, Break it Down Again (Roland saluted whenever the military drum roll sounded off -- oh so adorable), Raoul and the Kings of Spain, Pale Shelter, Head Over Heels. They performed quite a number of tunes from their reunion albums, all of which I proudly knew - Floating Down the River, Call Me Mellow, Secret World. Went nuts when Roland did that thing he does when he gets to the refrain of "Secret World" -- swings his hips while he strums that red guitar. Holy mother of g...I thought I was going to pass out.

Effie nudged me while I was watching him on the Jumbotron, and yelled into my ear: "Look! Roland has man-boobs!" Aaarghh, the nerve of this woman! He does NOT! Those are pecs, I tell you! Pecs!! Fine, so his Royal Hotness seems a bit chunky now, but in my head he'll always be the cool dancing Roland in the Change and Mad World videos, and the grinning dish in Everybody WTRTW. To borrow a line from another Ro fan, Roland is my dog. But wait a second, it's not like Curt hasn't fallen victim to gravity himself. Man-boobs he has not, but gray hair and wrinkles he does. But does it matter, really, how badly they've aged, when they sound just as good as they used to back in the day?

The first song of the encore was "Woman in Chains", and the person who did the female vocals

was a man with an astoundingly high-pitched voice, and he sounded exactly like Oleta Adams. The last song of the night, which came much to soon, was "Shout". The audience did just exactly that, and by the time the last note was struck, Roland had his hands over his ears, and a great big smile on his face.

Rumors are floating around that they might come back soon for a second show. Damn right they should, so they can give us all those songs we didn't hear. Suffer the Children. Mothers Talk. Advice for the Young at Heart. I Believe (ooh! with a shirtless Ro singing slouched on chair?). Broken. Last Days on Earth. Famous Last Words. The Hurting. Watch Me Bleed. The Working Hour. The Year of the Knife. Start of the Breakdown. The Way You Are. Change (ooh! so we can dance the Roland-with-the-woman-in-the-japanese-mask dance!)!

I didn't want to leave, even when the house lights were turned back on. Two hours, nineteen songs. If they had gone on for nineteen more until the wee hours of May 3, I would have stayed. No need to think hard for a Tears song that applies to a moment like this.

All for freedom and for pleasure, nothing ever lasts forever.

(SIGH). See you soon, Roland and Curt! What a great show.

Ready, get set.. Roland!

I see that another gray hair has sprouted from my head overnight. Most certainly the product of the busiest April in the history of my life so far. My work at the office has doubled since the ignominious exit of my sadly incompetent Over-all Cashier, and now, in addition to auditing the daily coconuts, I have to draw up the paper reports myself, which is no walk through the park when you're already up to your neck with beansy numbers. On my non-office days I had another epic by a certain blind (and possibly illiterate - it says so on the book blurb) bard to condense into little more than twelve thousand words. Definitely more like a walk through the Gaza strip for all the stress I went through trying to strain the flowery, verbose, cholera-level diarrhea-like prose into brief, comprehensible English. The principal character in this story, after many dangerous adventures, returns home after twenty years. I, on the other hand, felt that I aged by the same length of time. 'The greatest story ever told', my ass. Don't they mean the LONGEST?

My place was being overwhelmed every day by cement dust from two simultaneous constructions in the neighborhood, which required my constant attention with my overworked vacuum cleaner. When I finally finished shrinking the cursed epic and sent it by email, there was another job waiting in my inbox. I had only five days left to write my Palanca entry, but I couldn't let this new job hang at the risk of being blackballed by the publisher I work for. So I guaranteed the creation of another gray hair by taxing the right side of my brain with the simultaneous job of translating deep Filipino into English, and stringing the right words together for my contest entry.

Everything is finished at last, right on schedule, and now I am ready to sit back, relax, unwind and get ready for the show I've been waiting for since August 2008, when I wrote the post-Rick Astley blog and wondered if a concert promoter would ever book Tears for Fears. As it turns out, moody, tortured, uber-cool Roland Orzabal is indeed going to sally into town with that pout of his. Sugoi!!!! I can't wait for Sunday!

He is Why I Run on Sundays

So pretty.

This is what my college degree was for

Obsessed? What makes you say that?

Whoosh!

I know. It doesn't look like this Ferrari belongs to me, or that I even belong with a Ferrari. If I work every minute of my life until I am a doddering seventy, I would still only scrape enough coconuts to pay for two wheels and half the exhaust pipe. This beauty (the car, not me) was parked at the Bahay ng Alumni on Easter Sunday morning. What was I doing there? Well, that's getting ahead of my real story.

Like I said I would, I met up with my sister for our second 'jalking' date last Sunday the 4th. I drove into Agoncillo Street at 7:45 AM just as my sister was getting out of her car with four new jalking pals - cousin Yami-chan, her boyfriend Marc, Yami's mom, Tiya Cely, and Michaela, who boards in the attic room of Tiya Cely's house. A couple of stretches here, and a couple of stretches there, and we were off. The group split up as soon as we got to the oval. My sister immediately disappeared into the thick crowd of jalkers, Tiya Cely got on the sidewalk and commenced a route under the trees, Marc went sprinting away with Yami chasing after him, and I brought up the rear at a brisk amble with Michaela.

iPod earphone filtering new wave and j-pop in right ear. Half-finished lemon lollipop dangling from corner of mouth. Cap jammed tightly onto head. As we went past the weird guy who wears a cape and mask (I had seen him the previous Sunday wearing a cape of a different color), who sat smiling at everyone from one of the yellow barricades lined up near the Oblation, I broke into a run and kept it up for a couple hundred yards before slowing down to a walk. Walk, run, walk, run. That was how we did our first two circuits of the oval. Like I said, I was going to do three, so when we passed Yami-chan, Marc and Tiya Cely resting on a bench across Agoncillo, I yelled 'mo ichido!' and went on walking. Yami yelled out that my sister had just gone running by.

Michaela couldn't run anymore, so I held off until we reached the speed bump near the law building. I put on Modern English's 'Ink and Paper' and galloped the last hundred yards to the bench under the trees. My sister was already there, looking like she didn't even break a sweat! Michaela came loping along some thirty seconds later.

Some guy wearing a PNP jersey invited my sister, Yami-chan and I to try out for a dragon boat team he was putting together. Said we had the right build and the stamina for it. (EH? Stamina? Are we on candid camera?) My sister did most of the listening, and she took his mobile number. I went on doing stretches and a bit of dancing around (couldn't help it; I went thrice around the oval! Wouldn't you want to dance around like an idiot too?). Not interested in becoming a dragon boat amazon woman, though it's flattering to be told that I could be one. Currently, my highest athletic goal is to complete four circuits of the Oval.

And now we come the reason why I was at the Bahay ng Alumni on the same Easter Sunday morning that we got recruited for a dragon boat team. After the PNP guy left, Tiya Cely treated all of us to breakfast at the Chocolate Kiss cafe. My sister and I polished off some pancakes slapped with butter and drizzled with syrup, and then we snarfed down some beef tapa with a fried egg and some garlic rice. Tiya Cely ordered a largish sandwich, and the rest of the group tucked in platefuls of heavy pasta. So much for being candidates for a lean, mean racing team. What was the point of jalking around the oval if we were going to eat back perhaps even more calories than we burned?

Well, it sure is the perfect excuse to go jalking again next Sunday :)

Comprehensible

What an absolute thrill it is to speak to someone in their own language, and actually be understood! Today I spoke some Nihongo to a real Japanese for the first time, and he understood me! Immediately! My mother's good friend from college and her Japanese husband are here on vacation, and when we came to meet them at the Manila Pavilion, I shook his hand and said "Hisashiburi desu". He gave me such a happy smile that I might as well have given an acceptance speech for a Pulitzer.

He said we should come and visit them in Japan soon, and I said 'rainen'. Next year. When his wife Tita Linda mistook me for someone still in college, and Tita Rosie ( another friend of my mother's who also came to meet the couple) blurted out that I was much older than I looked, I said my age in Nihongo - 'sanju-hachi sai desu'. That was when Tito Yoshi spoke a whole sentence to me that I was so happy to quickly comprehend - 'Watashi no musume wa onaji desu' - his daughter is the same age as me. After that he said his son was 34 - also in Japanese, and though I got confused at first and thought he said twenty-four, I gathered my wits quickly enough to correct myself.

In no way was it a stellar display of linguistic ability, but I'm completely ecstatic just to have exchanged a dozen comprehensible foreign words with a real person. In no way did I deliver a UN-worthy performance, but to me it was worth all these months of talking to the plants, Nakatsu the stray cat, the dashboard of my car, and myself in the mirror.

Honto ni ureshii da!!!! I'm really happy.

Unholy Behavior in the Middle of the Holy Week

Heck Kuryu-san, I'll assume any position you want.

Ouch

Note to self: If you've only gone running four times in your entire life (1. When you had to run the 50-yard dash for a grade school PE class, 2. When your freshman gym class was made to run six times around the U.P. track oval without a break and you were silently wishing, while you felt your heart burning a hole through your chest, that the teacher would shrivel up and die, 3. When, instead of playing some less-agitating badminton, your friends had the bright idea of taking a run around Camp Karingal, and while you felt your heart burning a hole through your chest you wished that they and the rest of the world would shrivel up and die, and 4. When you very recently went for that 6AM jog along the beach at Pueblo por la Playa), jogging (technically, "jalking", jogging (20%) and walking (80%)) twice around the U.P. oval on a Sunday morning with your more experienced sister will most certainly end up in muscle pain.

Omega Pain Killer has been my good friend since Monday morning. My calves and my ankles are as stiff as plywood, and I reek of liniment. The only comfortable way to walk is to drag both feet across the floor. I am in pain but I am masochistically enjoying it. I've agreed to go jalking again next Sunday with the more experienced sister who runs in head-to-toe Adidas, and to seal my commitment I have purchased a better pair of shorts and acquired a free and barely used Clima-lite top from cousin Yami-chan (yasashii ne! domo arigato!). Ever since I took that morning jog at the beach last month (I honestly only did it because I wanted to break in my new Nikes), I've been thinking about running. I hated running before, but now I'm starting to kind of like it. Go figure. It might be the MTV effect of having music playing into my ear from an i-Pod while my feet are pounding on the pavement. It might be because I feel this urgency to find every possible way to defy ageing and stay in shape before I turn forty.

Even if it might mean that I'll have to take a bath in liniment, even if my ankles and calves might feel like cement, come Sunday I will go running with the Adidas-clad sister again, and I won't be content with just two circuits around the Oval. I'll do three, and I promise I won't regret it.

He's 38 and he still looks fabulous. If he can do it, so can I.

Beach Bum

It was my mother's 69th birthday last Sunday. We would have taken her out for a spa party and a nice dinner, but she had made arrangements to show her old med school classmates the Bantigue beach-front property, as well as the fully-developed resort right next to it called Pueblo por la Playa for an upcoming reunion. So we got my mom to agree to stay overnight at the Pueblo, and ended up tagging along with the oldies on their road trip.

It takes about three and a half hours to drive from Manila to Lucena, but even with the ever-reliable Mang Nes at the wheel, it felt like forever in the silly green Crosswind that was in desperate need of a new set of shock absorbers. Try riding a bucking horse for three and a half hours, see if you don't feel like your insides have been through the blender.

My mother rode in the lead car with her classmates and they went straight on to Bantigue; the rest of us in the bucking bronco were assigned grunt duty: pick up the food at Lola's house. My grandmother has been bedridden since 2000, and has lived with my mother since then, but her house in the Lucena town proper still stands, and is under the care of Mang Nes and his wife, Ate Rosie. Whenever we dream up weekend outings like this, it's always Ate Rosie we call for the food preparations.

When we arrived at Lola's house, I went upstairs to see whether it had changed much since I last saw it. I lived there for three years beginning 1997. Except for some furniture that might have switched places, it still looks the same, from the TV nook with the ancient Carlos family portrait hanging above it, down to my grandmother's showcase filled with dolls -- most of them collected over the years from her trips overseas, and the rest given by her grandchildren.

We had to wait a little while longer for the food to get stowed properly into the boot, so to pass the time I bought half a dozen buns from the bakery located at the corner of the house. I used to love these buns when I was a kid and I wanted to find out whether they would taste the same now that I'm six times older. They're half-moon shaped bread with red filling in the middle; properly called "kalihim" (secretary), but I can never seem to remember it, and it's the unofficial monicker (taught to me by a colorful college friend) that sticks to my brain like cancer: "pan de regla". Loosely translated as (eek) "menstruation bread"

So... where was I? The food! Well, it was all finally loaded into the car, and we drove off for Bantigue. First a short stopover at the CDLI office to drop off Mang Nes, and then my sister took over the wheel, with a firm reminder from Mang Nes to drive slowly when she gets to the sloping driveway of the Bantigue property, or risk spilling our precious cargo of soup for the prawn sinigang. My sister took it way too seriously and drove rather too slowly the entire way. On top of that, she missed the turn to Bantigue and had to take a u-turn, just nearly kissing the headlights of a giant truck. Slow slow slow slow. The winding road that is Barangay Bantigue seems longer when the driver doesn't want to get killed around the next bend, but when we finally passed the gates of the property, it was like the amen after a dull homily.

The last time I was here was six years ago, when I brought four friends over for a weekend, but it's the same as I remember it. The city flies out of your mind as soon as you see the water.

The food was given the last touches in the kitchen, slabs of pork and a giant fish were cooked on the outdoor grill, my mother's siblings, their spouses and some of our cousins came over, and each of us ate enough lunch to choke a horse.

We had the pleasure of meeting three interesting animals on the beach that day: Ashley, Barnard and Marie's chihuahua, which is really so small you actually can stuff it into a bag; a fluffy white cat with a yellow tail and a yellow patch (he ran away when I first tried to make friends, but I caught him sleeping under the cabana and it turns out he just likes to play hard-to-get), christened 'Takuya' by yours truly; and last comes Doglas, the faux-Dalmatian with the big sad eyes (stupidly, I forgot to take his picture).

My mother's classmates made their way back to Manila late in the afternoon, and the relatives went home. The rest of us - watashi, my mom, my sister, brother-in-law Chris and nephew Jakob, jumped over to the fancy-shmancy resort next door. In a place like Pueblo por la Playa, you can only get in if you are endorsed by a member of the club (domo arigato, Tiya Mila!). While the casita rates are pretty reasonable (3500 daily for a place that can sleep five comfortably), the food prices are a little prohibitive (bringing food from outside the resort is not allowed). Moreover, unless the member's right there to sign all your charge slips, an automatic 12% gets slapped onto your bill. But in spite of the fact that this vacation was burning holes into our pockets (I was paying for the casita, my sister and Chris were springing for the food), every minute was worth every cent.

Soon after we were given our red guest identification bracelets and the keys to house 4-A, we got into our suits and jumped into the pool. The one closer to the beach is meant for kids and is barely three feet deep, but I like hanging out with the nephew, so I stuck around and tried to teach him how to use a kickboard. Gave him a proper demo too, but you know how it is with artists; they like to do their own thing. To this kid, one kickboard makes a frisbee, and two kickboards make a pair of wings.

We had dinner that night at the Oaxaca Cafe. So-so. My Salpicao was a bit on the tough side, and the Pizza Margherita crust was much to thin as to be floppy. In the menu, their description for the Burger Steak reads: "Beef patty grilled to your likeness..." (hahaha *snort*). I wish I had ordered it; now I'll never know what I would look like if I were a hamburger.

Though I was paying through the nose for the casita rental, I was not given the privilege of choosing where I would sleep. My sister and her husband commandeered the bed on the TV side of the room so they could watch 'Mutiny on the Bounty' (Marlon Brando waaaaay before he got extremely porky). I was to share the queensize bed with my mother and my nephew on the nothing-there-but-the-bed side of the room.

I wasn't sleepy yet, so I went out on the terrace and sat in the hammock with my phone and journal. Just to annoy my friends (who were all stuck in the city) I sent them this message: "Ah this is nice. Sea wind coming in from the beach as I lie in a hammock on the terrace. All I need now is Kimura Takuya." (If by some miracle he did blunder by? Spider trap!!! I'd twist him up in the hammock like a helpless fly. Aw, come to meeeeeee Takuyaaaaaaaa.)

I went to bed around 11PM, but I didn't get much sleep. My nephew, as it turns out, is a

mumbler, squealer, blanket-grabber, and nocturnal kicker. At least eight times during the night

I got kicked in various areas of my backside, and at least two landed on my spine. I gave up

trying to sleep when the clock struck 6AM, and within the next fifteen minutes I was out the

door. I went for a run along the beach, with a camera in my pocket, and j-pop playing on my

iPod.

The rest of the family wandered down to the beach thirty minutes later, and after a few snapshots we made our way to the Oaxaca for breakfast. If dinner did not impress me, breakfast certainly did. The free continental breakfast (for two) was very good, the coffee was strong and kept hot in a thermos, and the pancakes I ordered were light and fluffy. My mother's fruit platter was fresh, and the nephew's strawberry waffle was loaded.

After breakfast, there was time left for another swim before the noontime checkout. I stayed in the water as long as I could, soaking in the coolness, worshipping the sun, hoping to turn a little brown before the city claimed us all again.

I came down with the flu the evening after we returned to Quezon City. Maybe I had way too much fun that it blew up my system. But if I had known that I would catch a bug on this trip and get laid up for almost a week, I still would have jumped into the silly green bucking Crosswind and taken my chances.

Umi ga daisuki desu.

I love the beach!