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.