smell me

THE CINNAMON PEELER by Michael Ondaatje

---

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbor to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
-- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women

the grasscutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.

And you searched your arms

for the missing perfume.

and knew

what good is it

to be the lime burner's daughter

left with no trace

as if not spoken to in an act of love

as if wounded without the pleasure of scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me.

restraint

There are days when you feel like a big vessel brimming with tears. As you sit up in bed in the morning you feel waves of it rocking inside you, threatening to spill. You walk with mincing steps, holding everything in--for one quick movement, one sudden jerk, and those tears may start sloshing down at the sides. You dread the moments when people talk to you or smile at you, for you will be forced to smile and talk back. The smile will widen, split your face in half, and everything will come rushing out, leaving nothing but ugly, rubbery folds of skin where your grinning lips and happily flushed cheeks used to be.

(es)chewing the fat

When did the Pinoy custom of greeting someone you haven't seen in quite a while with "Saan ka papunta?" or "Kumain ka na?" get replaced with "Tumaba ka, ah." or "Ang taba mo ngayon."

I've been puzzling over this with my friends P, R, and J for several days already. Two of them came home (for vacation) from studying abroad and the people who've seen them kept on remarking on how they've put on weight. I'm very sure they really traveled back all this way just so they could hear that delightful piece of news.

Last Saturday, I saw someone whom I hadn't seen for several weeks and the first thing she said was, "Taba mo."

I was actually feeling good that day, and thought I looked quite spiffy in the white shirt I was wearing for the first time. And she just managed to ruin my mood with that very thoughtful remark. Okay, maybe she didn't know that I used to have a major problem with my weight and that hearing that I've gotten fat is never welcome. Still, I was pissed, and told her, "Tang**a, kailan pa ba nauso na gawin pambati yan?"

She obviously did not get that she had actually offended me and even added, "Hindi nga, seryoso." And I felt even more terrible. Okay, so she isn't at all ugly, and she is thin. So make me feel like a fat cow, why don't you?

R, when I had asked him several days ago about this social behavior, actually tried coming up with an explanation. He said that it's probabaly a Pinoy way of establishing a feeling of familiarity, closeness, and community. What they're actually trying to say is: Hey, you are my friend and so I say this ugly, mean, horrible, wicked thing (since I don't have enough EQ to be aware that it is potentially offensive) just to let you know that I care enough to actually pay attention when there are changes happening to your body.

However, yesterday, before J and I dropped him and P off at Metrowalk, we again got to talking about it in the car, since R mentioned that people have once again been saying that he's fat. J said that people who say such things are stupid and rude, and I reminded R about what he had told me. He responded, "I just said that to try to make myself feel better."

When they got out of the car, J turned to me and said, "See, it doesn't matter if you try to explain that behavior in fancy words. There's just no accounting for rude and stupid."

Do I Have To?

My interactions with rice have always been tainted with guilt. At the tender age of nine, under the disapproving eyes of my mother and aunts, I would devour one whole bandehado of rice--equivalent to about three cupfuls--on regular meals. When the viand along with the rice was a favorite, like talunang manok or talangka, I could chuck in another cup or two. One of the more famous stories my relatives love trading around the reunion dinner table is of how my mother once tried putting me on a diet. When she brought me to my Lola’s house for our weekly family get-together there, she put the big bandehado of rice all the way to the end of the long narra table—and well away from my reach. Whoever was telling the story would start shaking with laughter as he or she recalled how I looked longingly and with such hunger at that pile of rice after I had finished the half-cup my mother had placed on my plate. It got so bad that a single tear escaped and rolled down my cheek. My lola, when she saw that tear, started cursing everyone at the table for their cruelty—“Hindi na kayo naawa sa bata!”—then she proceeded to grab the bandehado and plonk it right in front of me. No surprise then that I became quite pudgy—and my cousins and friends would often taunt and tease me about it.

The worst of the lot would be the grubby boys of our truck mechanic. And too bad they also happened to be my favorite playmates. Sometimes, since these boys lived just a stone’s throw away, I would go home with them when their mother, a big-haired, gap-toothed woman who looked perpetually pregnant, hollered her “Oy, mekeni!” in a voice like a foghorn. For merienda, Aling Syoneng would often serve us a peculiar sort of lugaw with regular long-grain rice cooked in lots of water and flavored with white sugar. She’d sit at one end of the table and go slugging away on a bottle of pale pilsen while watching us eat. If I stayed long enough I sometimes saw them cook rice and ulam not on a stove, but by using panggatong. One time, when I tried helping by loading some more wood to feed the fire, I lost my balance and burned my leg. When Mother found out how I got the burn, she lectured me on how I shouldn’t impose on the pobre mechanic’s family and how they have little enough to eat without having an extra mouth—mine—to feed. The next time I ate at the boys’ house was several months later. I was served biscuits and coffee at the wake of Aling Syoneng who had died of cirrhosis.

When I was diagnosed as a juvenile diabetic due to obesity and old enough to have an interest in boys as more than just playmates, I went on a strict diet that limited my caalorie intake. That meant going from several cupfuls of rice every meal to a cup or less. I shed a lot of pounds—and wouldn’t stop. When I started looking like a walking pile of fish bones and getting sick almost every month, my mother put a stop to the nonsense and ordered me to eat. I obeyed, but not without feeling like I was doing my body a disservice every time I did so. It was only when I took up running as a P.E. course in UP that I started eating sans the accompanying queasiness from guilt.

As a college dormer in Diliman, I survived on instant noodles and canteen food so I never learned how to cook. It was a different story though, when I went on to stay in UP as a full-time teacher. I had my stomach to appease, I was getting sick of fast food, and I had a boyfriend to impress. Being the staple, rice was top priority. I faced the challenge of cooking with much trepidation, considering that another famous story in our family is how I almost burned our house down by boiling an egg and then promptly forgetting about it. The by-product of that experience was a blackened lump in the middle of a smoking Teflon pot never to be used for cooking again.

My first attempt was a huge letdown. I put in just enough water to cover the rice instead of following the 1:1 ratio and, of course, the grains failed to fluff up and cook completely. With a sudden attack of conscience from knowing how many mouths two gatangs of rice could feed, I sadly threw my failure into the trash.

With all these unpleasant memories, I should’ve given up entirely on rice. But it’s such a pervasive part of our daily lives. What needs to be done is to found fond memories of the vexing grain. Maybe in doing so, I can make peace with it and, eventually, lay all this guilt to rest.

first kiss

My first kiss came from a boy named Valentin. He was standing in line behind me as we waited for our turn to drink from the water fountain beside the school canteen. I had just come from a game of Chinese-garter with my friends and could only think of that first cold mouthful of water going down my parched throat. As I bent down to drink, I felt something soft and dry brushing swiftly against my cheek. Like dried leaves. I didn’t even know what had happened, and it was only when the other people in line started puckering their lips and making kissing motions that I realized Valentin had kissed me. He was just standing at one side with a goofy grin on his face. And then—was it embarrassment? surprise? fear?—whatever it was, it made me grab an empty bottle from one of the soft drink crates and chase him around the school playground with it. Thankfully, I never caught him. I wouldn’t have known what to do if I did. Would I have hit him on the head? Would I have cried? I still don’t know up to now.

eulogy (more than a year later)

The clearest childhood memory I have of Daddy was of the time when we went to Fiesta Carnival, which was, back then, still a hip and happening place in Cubao. I remember wearing an itchy yellow dress and white mary janes and when Daddy introduced me to one of the giant statues there—that of a clown—I started bawling my lungs out since I was terrified of the clown’s huge painted face. But with his usual low laugh and encouragement, I overcame enough of my fear to later on actually sit on the shoulder of that clown for a picture.

My dad was always like that—he pushed, teased, cajoled, encouraged, laughed you into realizing the potential he'd been seeing in you all along. He always believed in his kids—in their intelligence and talents—pretty much because, he always said, “May pagmamanahan kasi.” This confidence in his family and in himself was nothing short of astounding. He believed we could do anything, and so he would always drive us into going beyond our perceived limitations.

This is not to say that Dad was some maniacal slave-driver—he was actually more of the sentimental sort. I remember how every valentine’s day and birthday without fail, a dozen roses would always arrive for mommy (mostly yellow, her favorite), and how he would embrace and kiss us whenever he felt like it, how he took us to the best restaurants, and how he insisted on buying us the best things his money at the moment could buy. He gave each of his children silly pet names—like “Megoy Panghi” and “Pupay”. My mom he always called Darl—short for darling. And we, not just my mom, all felt that indeed we were that—my dad’s darlings.

My dad loved to live. He was completely, absolutely tone deaf but would always compete for the mic in videoke sessions to belt out the most hideous renditions of "My Way", "Bikining Itim", and Julio Iglesias’ "To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before". He didn’t know how to dance but would pull insistently on my mom’s hand to lead her to the dance floor and do the cha-cha. He enjoyed life’s little luxuries—good food in some fancy restaurant, the occasional pleasure trip overseas with mom, high fidelity music from some expensive sound system he had bought. Even after his first stroke, Dad never stopped enjoying what life had to offer. One thing that actually astonished his doctors so much was the speed of his recovery. He could hardly talk and move half his body at the beginning of his illness but he undertook his rehabilitation with single-minded determination and sheer strength of will so that he was able to function normally in no time. Even in his last few weeks, when he was getting extremely weak, he would insist on moving about by himself—unbelieving that there are things he couldn’t possibly do.

I have been talking at length about Daddy and I’m now just finding it so strange to refer to someone like him, whose presence and charm could once fill a whole room, as a “was” instead of an “is”. The past Valentine’s was the first one he wasn’t able to give mommy flowers and that was already jarring enough. Now, I expect it will feel weird to come home every weekend and not see him in his blue swivel chair in front of the TV. I will be sad every time I leave on Sunday evenings and not be able to kiss him goodbye. As the family he left behind, we can grieve, regret, and move on but I am convinced that one thing we will not be able to do is to forget. For as Daddy’s children, we bear his imprint in each of us. Daddy can be seen in Angela’s snub nose and beautiful eyes; in Meg’s small, full lips and child-like grin; in Ernan’s dusky skin and husky, malambing, bolero voice; in Cathy’s cherubic cheeks and slim elegant feet; and as for me—I see Daddy when I look at my finger and toenails, when I find myself pouting in intense concentration, and when I become tigas-ulo and insist on getting my own way. But most of all, I think, I will see my father in me, my siblings, and my mom when we try to be more than what we can be, when we push the envelope, when we relish each second, and when we grab life by the throat and live it to its fullest, as he had done and had taught us to do.

Let us now say goodbye to a man who, at certain points in his life, was to us Chummy, Pare, Ponga, Barbs, Lolo, Tito, Darl, and Daddy.

self-awareness

This is what you are supposed to do. Cut and paste if you decide to participate in the tagging game.

Each player of this game starts off by giving six weird things about themselves. People who get tagged need to write in a blog of their own six weird things as well as state the rules clearly. In the end, you need to choose six people to be tagged and list their names.
After you do that, leave them each a comment letting them know you tagged them and to read your blog.

Six Weird Things About Me!


1. Whenever I'm drinking, my immediate area should always be clean.

Yep, I can't stand it when my drinking area is smelly/messy. Of course, when my friends start getting bored with the conversation, they start throwing used tissue, bottle caps, matchsticks my way for a good laugh. And I just can't help but wipe/throw it all away. I also hate puddles created by sweating beer bottles/glasses. Shite.

2. If someone asks me to share my food with them and I don't get to have the last bite, I feel cheated and unsatisfied.

So unless I tell you (after having consulted myself, of course) that you can finish it all, please leave me that one last bite--even if the only thing left is the size of a toenail clipping.

3. When I'm out with a bunch of people and I'm getting bored with them, I hold a party in my head with the same people present--but with wittier conversation and much more exciting things happening (like doing a cossack dance under the table).

4. I need a bit of "alone time" every day.

Otherwise, I get cranky and unbearable.

5. When a certain type of food becomes my favorite, I'll eat it every day--and then become so sick of it I won't be able to stand to even look at that food (or even its variations) for months.
Ditto for music--I'll play it over and over again until the tune starts coming out of my ears.

6. When you touch my feet, my reflex action is to kick.

It took a lot of convincing (and conditioning) myself to let other people touch them when I got vain enough to want a pedicure.

food for the heart

I wasn’t at all a sickly child. Actually, I was quite brown and robust from playing patintero, sha-to, ta-ching, tex out in the sunshine the whole day with the six dusty little boys of our truck mechanic who lived in a shanty just a few blocks from our house. It was for this reason that being rendered bed-ridden always came as a big, unwelcome surprise for me and moldering in bed while imagining the boys shouting, running, having so much fun outside was the cruelest form of torture. I was a bad patient, and I screamed and sulked through most of the common childhood illnesses that came my way. The only things that made those days of internment bearable were the marvelous gastronomical treats my Tita Loleng always managed to whip up to hasten my recovery.

Tita Loleng is my mother’s older sister and the family maiden aunt. While I was growing up, she had custody over me and my cousins at my lola’s ancestral home in Zapote, Las Piñas during weekends. She had a wide, angular face where a pair of huge, round-framed glasses always sat and short hair that she coiled into numerous curlers every night so that it would poof up the next day. She was strict and very easy with the back of the tsinelas whenever one of us misbehaved. But my cousins and I, and the rest of the family, knew that we were much loved by Tita Loleng. Not the touchy-feely, demonstrative sort, she displayed her affection in a more subtle and satisfying way—through the delicious spread she constantly laid out on the ancestral house’s long narra table and the specially-prepared meals she sent our way when one of us got sick.

My family is a firm believer in the healing ability of good food. Be it the common cold to something as serious as pneumonia, they would immediately hasten to inform the most talented cook in the family so she can send the patient’s favorite food or something she knows will become a favorite once he or she has sampled it. The most delicious food I’d ever tasted always came at a time when I was ill. Chalk it up to Tita Loleng’s culinary talents that she could make a sick family member come up for seconds when it was a meal she had prepared.

When I contracted measles, I remember my Tita Loleng feeding me pospas, which is like the Chinese congee. But the pospas she served me then was custom-made for it had chicken ass in it instead of regular chicken parts like the leg or breast. Tita Loleng knew that this was my favorite part and had seen how often I had scrabbled to get that delectable piece on my plate before my dad, who also liked it, could do so. Tita Loleng’s pospas was flavorful and fragrant, unlike most pospas or lugaw I’ve tasted in carinderias or fast-food chains. The secret is in the garlic, I think. She would first sauté and brown mortar-pounded garlic. The oil, I remember her telling me, holds the imprint of the first thing you fry in it—so you toss in first whichever it is you’d want to be dominant in taste. Once light-toasted brown in color, the garlic is removed and set aside. Then the ginger and onions are sautéed until their smell starts filling your kitchen. For my special pospas, Tita Loleng minced the ginger so I wouldn’t have to maneuver my way around or end up biting large chunks of the bitter root. Then the chicken parts, in my case my beloved chicken ass, are tossed in. The patis comes soon after. The next step is another cooking tip Tita Loleng has passed on to me. This involves covering the pot and allowing the chicken juice (or langsa) to ooze out. She calls this process sangkutsa and this is done so that the gamy taste is removed from the chicken. Once done with sangkutsa, the juices should be allowed to dry out, but not completely or your chicken will burn and stick to the bottom of the pot. Add the malagkit or short-grain, sticky rice, water and chicken broth. Once the rice is cooked, season with salt and pepper and when the pospas has reached the preferred consistency, it is ready to serve. Most people like pospas with calamansi, toyo, and a bit more of patis but I like mine with nothing else but the set-aside toasted garlic and lots of chopped spring onions.

I remember one time when it was Tita Loleng’s turn to get sick. I was in high school then, and was not yet adept in the kitchen since I spent most of my spare time reading historical romances and watching TV. My cousins and I decided to make something for Tita Loleng and I suggested pospas, but made with halaan or clams. We had a grand time of it, even had a skirmish between two cousins that involved two sandoks being wielded as dangerous weapons. In the end, it was probably the proverbial “too many cooks spoiling the broth” but the clams were overcooked and tough, the lugaw had the faint taste of being burnt since someone forgot to stir, and someone else dumped in too much pepper. Shame-faced, we presented our group culinary effort to Tita Loleng who gamely ate a bowlful and asked for another helping. When she was done eating, she lay down on her propped-up pillows and gave us a smile. That smile made me understand why she has always found her happiness in serving us the best food though it meant slaving away for hours in a hot kitchen. It was a smile of appreciation for a good meal, and of joy in knowing that you are loved.

drill

Yesterday, a friend studying in a school a la Hogwarts recounted the fire drill that had been conducted in his boarding place at 7 am. He thought while it was happening that it was the real deal--and he even thought he was the one who had caused it.

His story reminded me of the one and only fire drill I experienced in my old place along Katipunan. It was done at 1 pm but I was sleeping that time, having had a late night spent on studying for the English department's GEC (Guidance and Evaluation Committee) observation. Anyway, groggy and bleary eyed, I realized that the fire alarm was ringing and I panicked. I picked up my cell phone, wallet, and towel (?) and stuffed it into my ex's gym bag (which was full of clothes. He had left it in my place because he was transferring to a new apartment and needed a tambakan for some of his stuff). So there I went, hauling this big red bag towards the stairway (I had enough presence of mind to know one should never use the elevator in that kind of emergency). The people from other units had their doors open and were looking at the hallway. It took me a while to notice that none of them seemed panicky at all, and some of them were actually smiling at me in amusement. I stood in the hallway for a few seconds before it hit me. I went to the intercom, called the guard, and asked him if there was really a fire.

"Drill lang po, ma'am," he said. And I could hear the laughter in his voice.

Pakdatshit. That's what happens when you don't mind the announcements posted on the bulletin board.

Pare!

I am, what most of my friends call, a guy-girl. No, I’m not bisexual, but I’m usually the only estrogen-carrier in a table full of testosterone-laden humans, the sounding board for musings on the female psyche, the convenient no-strings-attached date if a friend needs to present someone at some family dinner or high school/college reunion, the one who gets slapped as hard on the back as any other member of the barkada, the noisy drunk everyone tries to render senseless with copious amounts of beer. I am the stereotypical “one of the boys”.

As far back as I can remember, I tended to gravitate towards groups composed of the opposite sex than girls. These boys always welcomed me with open arms. They never saw me as the other; I was always one of them. As a seven-year-old, I played patintero, sha-to, ta-ching, tex with the six dusty little boys of our truck mechanic who lived in a shanty just a few blocks from our house. In high school I was always horsing around with my male classmates who also sometimes treated me as a Dear Abby of sorts for their first attempts at dating (the “datee”s being the more popular girls in school, of course). In college, I was the non-sorority-member ka-barkada of one whole fraternity—that was when I learned to play pusoy, tong-its, and billiards; drink until the wee hours; and to sober up before class at different places around the university.

It’s not because I look like or dress like a boy. All right, so I’ve always sported short hair and I do have a stubborn, square jaw but I do have the less angular, softer features of a female. That I was really female became more obvious during puberty when my boobs started growing up to their present large size. I like wearing short skirts and I do put on make-up (I never leave home without my kikay kit).

Males just naturally feel comfortable when they’re with me. Maybe it’s because I don’t see them as potential flirt-material or boyfriends, or the way I can slug it out with the best of them when it comes to those raunchy jokes, possibly also the way I threaten them with bodily harm when they’ve gone a step too far. Or maybe it’s the way I feel happy and comfortable with them, too. I like being with these sweaty, odd, not-so-sweet-smelling creatures. The fact that they can relax and act like their natural selves when they’re with me is probably the reason why we get along so well.

But, as with everything, there are certain disadvantages to playing the guy-girl role, of course, and what follows are a few of them.

Males who are not members of your group, or who don’t know you that well, think you’re easy. I don’t know what it is exactly that makes people think that you’ve done the dirty deed with every guy you hang out with, but they just do. This is especially apparent when you meet the person at your favorite watering hole and he has seen you being surrounded by members of his species. There are two ways to handle this: cut him down to size yourself with a few intelligent, classy, go-away-you-are-a-sexist-idiot letdowns or put one of your barkadas to good use by asking him to give the jerk menacing looks. It helps a lot if said barkada is a big, brawny jock who looks like a killer.

Girlfriends and potential girlfriends see you as a threat. One of my few female friends, Dang, is almost always the object of hate by the significant others of her guy friends. She has gotten anonymous hate-mail, prank phone calls, and has even experienced one a la tele-novela confrontation scene. She’s pretty but not teeth-achingly so—unlike some of the girlfriends or dates of her friends. But it makes no difference. She is always considered a serious threat by these girls. Dang, in a fit of exasperation, once blurted out to a friend whose girlfriend was giving her grief, “If I wanted to sleep or get into a relationship with any of you, I would have made my move by now. You guys are so desperate anyway!” Of course, the last was a joke, but still. One guy friend explained it to me once when I asked him about the seeming irrationality of it and he said, “Well, think of it this way—which would make you more miserable: Your guy having had a one-night stand and then forgetting all about it or not having sex but actually forming a connection with someone?” The solution to this problem? Try befriending the girlfriend/nililigawan to show that she has nothing to fear from you. If that doesn’t work just ask your friend not to bring his girlfriend on your gimmicks anymore to save you both from possible drama.

The temptation to actually get into relationship with one of your friends. Gurl, this is a really bad idea. The idea can sometimes be really tempting but you have to think about this many, many times before you jump into anything. It has the potential to: actually ruin your reputation, thus reinforcing the above disadvantage I mentioned; break-up the group, especially if one or both of you are not mature enough to not force your friends to take sides; set a precedent—“tusok-tusok/tuhog of the barkada” is a big no-no. There are many fish out there in the dating ocean—take your pick. Do not piss where you eat. Okay, enough of the clichés and mixed metaphors—you get my point.

In spite of these possible setbacks, I am happy being a guy-girl. One of the greatest advantages is you get glimpses into the otherwise-murky male psyche and this helps a lot—most specially when you date (again, someone outside your group though). Of course, most of the time, it requires intestinal fortitude, great patience, the willingness to compromise and to weather a lot of problems, but what friendship doesn’t?

beauty bites

At around 9:30 pm last night, I was deep into one of my ang pangit ko moments (complete with crouching in a corner and rocking back and forth) so I decided to take the elevator down to the ground floor and subject myself to a facial cleaning session.

When I entered the clear glass doors I was welcomed by several tiny women wearing a cross between a nurse's and chambermaid's uniform. Something that looked like shower caps covered their heads and only their eyes could be seen above the surgical masks on their faces. I was asked to lie down on a narrow bed that resembled a gurney and the treatment began.

One of the nurses/maids slathered 2 kinds of cream and a cucumber-melon scented gel on my face, gave a wunnerful facial massage, and then steamed my face to open up my pores. Ah, I thought, to be pampered like royalty. Then I heard the clink of metal instruments--and the girl proceeded to gouge and scrape my skin raw for about 20 minutes. All through the last procedure tears periodically escaped from the corners of my eyes. After those few minutes of pure pain the girl proudly showed me the fruits of her efforts--2 squares of tissue peppered with gunk she had lovingly and enthusiastically extracted from my pores.

By then my face felt all puffy and sore but I still felt that I hadn't gone through enough of the required suffering to be beautiful. I asked the girl if they did waxing of the mustache area (I had just read an article in one of the newer magazines in our bathroom about how removing facial hair can change your whole look) and she said they did. I asked them if it would take very long and they said it would not take more than 5 minutes so I asked them to go ahead and do their stuff.

I remained on the gurney and a different girl came in. She then took a spatula, dipped it in some steaming, viscous liquid, blew on it to cool it off a bit, then spread it on half of my upper lip. This isn't so bad, I thought. Then before the wax could harden completely, she stuck a piece of thick cloth on the wax, smoothed it out, and then ripped it off my skin. It felt like she had torn away half of my face. She proceeded to do this three more times--the other half of my upper lip, then twice more on the lower lip. They weren't lying. It did not take more than five minutes--but the pain lingered well after the whole thing was over. I could just imagine how excruciating this would be if done on the legs or gasp! the bikini area.

So there you go, the requisite pain and suffering. I did feel cleaner and prettier when I woke up this morning--though my face still feels like it had been through hell and back.

It just struck me now--if you were a masochist and looking for some good hurtin' all you have to do is head on to your nearest facial clinic and subject yourself to their tender loving care.

just another day

Chong, here you go:

She had bruises on both arms and felt the urge to sink her teeth into flesh. She asked the person beside her if he'd be a willing victim to her gigil and he agreed. She bit his upper arm and felt him writhe. It helped diminish the gigil, but only for a while. Several beers later,she asked him again. It took a lot of prodding this time before he agreed. She saw him reach out and clutch the beefy arm of the person beside him in anticipation of the pain. As she was biting him she realized his arm will look tomorrow the way hers did right then.

They transferred to another place to get even more sloshed. It was already past 2 in the morning when everyone agreed to go home. As they headed for Sikatuna to drop off the cute young couple of the group the car engine died. Everyone got out and the men pushed the car to try and jump-start the engine. It didn't work. She looked at the car rolling slowly away from her and could not hold back her laughter. Three drunks pushing a tiny white car in the early morning amidst the noise of neighborhood dogs barking their disapproval was just more than she could handle.

Later on she listened to the men give their two cents' worth as to how to make the car start. One suggested they get gasoline, maybe it ran out. Another suggested looking at the engine, another was saying it was probably some broken cable and they would have to leave the car where it was. They tried all the suggestions, except the one about leaving the car. Two of the men rode a trike to get gasoline. They fed the tank a whole coke litro of gas but the engine remained obstinately quiet. They tried looking underneath the hood but couldn't figure out what was wrong. They tinkered with the battery and nothing happened. When everyone was about to give it up for lost, the car owner suddenly saw the problem--some hose that got disconnected. He reconnected the troublesome hose and everyone squeezed themselves into the car once more. A few meters later, the engine died. The damned hose got disconnected again. Eventually, the early morning (and the car) was saved by wet-with-saliva-but-still-sticky gum someone had been chewing on the whole time. They used that on the hose.

She was dropped off at her place at around 4:00 am. Fifteen minutes later, the driver messaged her: Home. Hehe. If I only had a blog. Between teethmarks and a gang of drunk idiots pushing a 38-year old car, this day would have made my top 5 best.

Hers, too.

beerday narrative

A narrative someone asked for as a birthday gift. Still on its rough stage so be forgiving. Haha.

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You boarded his car with beer goggles fixed firmly over your eyes—the world confined to a fishbowl and your head swimmy from all that San Mig Light. He got on the driver’s side beside you without saying a word, his mind seemingly somewhere else, as morose and unapproachable as he had been all night. You found that strange, and slightly annoying, as he was the reason why you and the others were at Sarah’s in the first place.

You weren’t even sure in the beginning if that invitation to welcome his coming birthday at Sarah’s really included you. The first time you had met you were tired, wound-up tight from your new job at the ICW, and slightly smarting from the premature ending of a promising flirtation. You somehow got drunk and shouted at him for some remark he had probably made in fun—something about lit majors being needy, if you recalled correctly. As if that had not been enough, you had stood, yanked up your shirtsleeves, and maybe (now this tidbit only according to your friends) even threatened to inflict bodily harm on his person. The day after, your friends and your niece—who had also been there that time—couldn’t stop hassling you about that incident. Embarrassment came to you in tsunami proportions and you promised yourself that you would never ever drink so much while feeling pissed. And since you had never seen him before at Sarah’s, you prayed that you wouldn’t ever lay eyes on each other again to save yourself from possible mortification. But, as you’d proven often enough in the past, the universe had a warped sense of humor so he sat at your table a few days later. That was the time when he had driven you home afterwards (was he being nice or would he suddenly push you out of the car while driving at 100kph) and invited you to his celebration—and you weren’t sure then if you should accept. You saw this move as suspect: would he pull some dirty trick to exact revenge for what you had done to him?

So there you all had been, his Friday group and your not-just-on-Friday group, sitting together and waiting for him—the birthday boy—to arrive. When he did turn up he seemed light years away from being happy. Now you’ve always had this compulsion to cheer people up, even when you were feeling tired and miserable yourself, and you tried to siphon away his dark mood—but he remained as sullen as ever. When he asked you half an hour later if it would be in bad form if he left ahead of everyone you wanted to hit him on the head with a beer bottle. A few minutes after twelve, when everyone was already smashed from the many rounds of beer he had treated you all to, he urged everyone to go home.

You tried to sleep in the car with your head still swimming—with beer, water, koi—but couldn’t so attempted to make conversation instead. You noticed that he was driving a different car, a gray one, from the last time he had driven you home. Déjà vu struck you—the same situation but with a different person behind the wheel. You had asked that person if he had been driving a red car the first time he had driven you home and he had answered with, “You must have been really drunk that first time because my car had always been gray.”

You asked him the same question you had asked the other more than a month ago but this person that you were with now answered that yes, the red one was his sister’s and this car he was driving now was his. You sat back and chewed on that for a while.

A few meters away from your condo you asked him why he was so sad. He answered that he just was, nothing wrong with that. You tried to make him explain, maybe you could then find that opening to cheer him up, but he managed to dodge all your probes. By this time you were already in front of your place but you didn’t make a move to get out of the car. He put another cd in the player and you asked him if that was your cue to leave. But he asked you to stay and you readily did. It was important to understand why he was so glum—maybe in doing so you could root out your own sadness.

Later on, he asked if you would like to go for coffee at the nearest gas station and you agreed. Once there, you both headed for the rest room and you saw him go past the men’s and head straight for the ladies’. You grabbed his arm and tried to steer him in the right direction; to your surprise, he told you that he was just going to open the door for you. Afterwards, he pulled a chair for you to sit down on but, not understanding, you pulled another chair and sat down on that one instead. He looked at you strangely then, but you could only shrug and smile. You settled yourselves in your respective chairs, facing each other, ready to do battle. And you talked well until dawn.



After he brought you home for the second time that night you suddenly realized, as you were wobbling up the stairs to the lobby, that you still hadn’t fully comprehended his sadness—or your own. You latched on to this failure and placed a hand on your belly, trying to find the familiar feeling of dejection, but found yourself smiling instead.