Coming loose

I just got off the phone with my mother, and she relayed a message from my brother in Singapore about us possibly taking time off at the same time so he and I could go home together.  It’s been a while.  The ideal itinerary would be for me to fly to Singapore, see my brother’s adopted city, and then fly home with him to the Philippines to essentially pick up my mom to go see Macao.

I had some objection to the Macao part.  While I would love to see Singapore, I also wanted to spend some time in the Philippines to see friends.  So I go, How about I see him in Singapore, then we go home together, and I stay home, but you guys take off for Macao? I added, half in jest, While you’re in Macao, I will throw a party for my childhood friends in your home.

The line goes silent for a moment.  I burst out laughing.  I go, Are you actually nervous about me partying in your house without you? My mom lets out a nervous laugh, and she goes, I want to be in the house, I will even help you plan your party, but I won’t mingle with your friends if you don’t want me to. By this time, I could not breathe from laughing so hard.  I go, So you really ARE nervous about it. She goes, Yeah, I don’t know what you’re going to do. I go, What do you think I’m going to do? She goes, I just don’t know. I go, I’m 28 years old!

It’s one of two things, and I can’t decide which is funnier: that I’m still a baby in her eyes, or that she thinks I’m actually capable of doing something really bad.  My mom goes to church everyday, so I suppose you can imagine that the bar for bad behavior would be exceedingly low.  Which is why I love to tease her.

And, boy, does she have a surprise coming.  I just sent her an old photo of me with one arm temporarily tattooed.

I have, in my Halloween-induced drunkenness (drink of choice: White Russian), resolved to see, before I die, my best friends in

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Rio de Janeiro/Salvador/Sao Paolo, Brazil

Panama City, Panama

Mexico City, Mexico

Ulm/Dusseldorf, Germany

Ljubljana, Slovenia

From now on, the only other places I want to see would be Machu Picchu in Peru and Rome.  Screw Paris, Amsterdam and Beijing.

What does it say about you, if…

10.  You put your favorite tie in the washer, thinking What’s the worst that could happen?, and it comes out completely destroyed.

9.  You do laundry, even though it’s not your laundry day, just so you could wear your Adidas shirt to the U2 concert the next day.

8.  You desperately need a wrist watch, but you still haven’t got one, because you still haven’t saved up enough for a paper-thin Skagen, the same one that you broke in the swimming pool some months back.  In the meantime, your old, still-ticking Timex just sits there doing nothing.

7.  You walk into a discount store to get some six dollar-earphones, and walk out with a six-dollar pair of shorts, a nine-dollar tie and a nine-dollar belt.  In your defense, they were great bargains: the shorts was Nike, the tie Chaps and the belt Levi’s.

6.  Your standard for how you should look in your 30s (*ahem* that’s just a couple of years away) is David Boreanaz.

5.  You watch your weight, not by how much you can tip the scale, but by your ability to squeeze into 29-inch jeans.

4.  You are thinking of throwing out your Speedos, because, well, those days are just so over.  What the hell were you thinking?

3.  You do yoga on your own, in the basement gym that you don’t even normally go to, just because there are pretty girls there.  In your defense, you started doing this, really, because the one yoga class you go to in your regular gym is so easy it bores you.

2.  You know that sunscreen and yoga do not go together.  It’s just not easy to balance on your arms if they slip.

1.  You are willing to sit through a three-hour documentary about monks who have taken a vow of silence.

1.  I recently, belatedly discovered the internet radio Pandora, on a tip from a friend, and I am totally impressed.  The radio creates an entire “station” out of your favorite song or artist, and the songs it chooses to play on one such “station” are incredibly agreeable.  They sound just like what you started with.  Indeed, the first five or six songs it played on the first “station” I created, with Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars, I already have MP3s of.  And then some.  I would never have found all these other songs on my own.  I also started a station with Moby’s Porcelain–remember this from the movie The Beach?–and it came up with a song that I can only describe as a satanic ritual, in what I suppose is Latin or Celtic or some other dead language, that is still somehow easy on the ears.

2.  I had some sort of a crystallizing moment a few weeks back.  For some reason I started to think about a life that might sound absurd or, worse, defeatist to some people, but one that I can nonetheless imagine myself living.  I am tempted to write about it, but I’m sure friends and family would have something to say about it, and I’m not prepared at this time to handle the reaction, so perhaps I should just shut up.  Ha ha.

3.  Ok, maybe I’ll let on just a little.   It all started with the realization that wherever I end up in in the future, even back home in the Philippines, I would have to readjust socially–make new friends, and other such rituals, as my old friends are all over the place–and perhaps culturally.  In other words, I could pick any random place, and it won’t make much of a difference.  I alluded to this on my last phone call to my mom, and she said something about making sure I would be happy there, wherever there is, and I only said that I think can find my own happiness.

4.  My Chinese roommate’s massive meat consumption makes me wonder if I should become a vegetarian, if only to cancel out his too-big share of the world’s meat production.  I once saw him stick in the oven an impressive slab of pork–if you ask me, it was a quarter of a hog–and two substantial sausage links.  He polished off all of it in one sitting.  It is unbelievable that not only can he eat so much, he can’t gain weight either.

The only thing worse than walking home in a lab gown is the reason why you’re walking home in a lab gown in the first place.

The whole day, you’ve been behind schedule in the lab for at least an hour.  Now, you have to stay late on a fucking Friday night.  Just as you are about to finish work, you drop the final experiment of the day into your crotch, soaking your jeans in all manner of salts and buffers.  But no, not only are your jeans now soaked, they are soaked in a very very embarrassing way.  At the very least, you look like you need diapers.

It gets better.  You get up to go get your lab coat, which should cover you up, but which you really should have been wearing in the first place.  It is, instead, sitting in another lab.  In your rush, it doesn’t enter your mind that the door to the lab you’ve been working in locks behind you as you step out.  The one key that lets you in is shared among your co-workers, and so is not in your own personal key ring.  This fact somehow slips your mind as well.  It is only after you’ve grabbed your lab coat and walked back when you realize that the all-important key might, in fact, still be lying on a lab bench that is now behind a locked door.  Oh shit.

Miracles do happen.  You stick your hand in your jeans pocket, and find the key there.

Somehow, you get yourself to repeat the last experiment.  At last, you walk home, in a lab gown.  You’re only grateful that you don’t meet anybody you know on the street.

I wish I could write something intelligent and classy about the very recent flooding in Manila –was it just days ago?  my days have kinda blurred into each other–but I can’t.  Either I’m too jaded or I’m too tired, and I am sorry that I don’t have it in me.  I’m sorry, too, for the people who lost loved ones and homes in one weekend.

John Francis, I don’t know how to contact you anymore, but when you finally get the space and the time, please let me know how you are.  You are the one I am most worried about, as I am under the impression that your neighborhood was among the harder-hit. (But Lenor just told me on YM she has heard from you, so I feel better now.  I wish I lived closer so I could help you guys with the putik. That’s what going to the gym is for; to provide muscle when needed.)

I wish I could say that all this were a part of some grander plan, but, alas, in my exhaustion, even I find that difficult to believe.

It is true, however unfortunate, that sometimes bad things happen to good people. Bangon, Pinoy.

There aren’t sports fans in the US more frustrated than tennis fans.  Insane corporate decisions, for example, entirely blacked out the semifinal of this year’s French Open.  The matches (Soderling v Gonzalez and Federer v del Potro) each became epics that lasted hours, and not a moment was shown in the US.  The rest of the world had a field day cracking jokes about how much of a backwater the US really is.  The Canadians were especially mean.  Ha ha.

Thank heavens for the internet.  Tennis fans like myself can now watch live tennis on any number of streams.  Except that most of the time, these streams are real TV broadcasts from other countries, and would therefore be in a language that I don’t speak.  Yep, that’s right: I have watched tennis matches in Russian–I only knew, because the advertisements pointed to .ru websites–and German–which I know what sounds like, having met a number of German people.  Funnily enough, I now find the clip and the harder vowels of the German language rather cute. I used to think the German language sounded harsh: you should hear the way Germans say “Blumentritt,” as in Ferdinand Blumentritt, Jose Rizal’s BFF.  But “Robredo”–as in Tommy Robredo, a Spaniard in the world top 20–sounds weirdly sweet if a German is speaking it.

No matter.  Most of the time, I can’t stand sports commentators anyway.  It’s just as well that sometimes I don’t understand what they’re saying.

This post started in my head last night on a hail of f-bombs.  It was that bad, but I’ve already slept it off.

The kitchen sink in my apartment had been partially clogged the last week or two.  I tried to live with it since the thing did drain eventually, and I was hoping that it would somehow clear up on its own.  But my Chinese roommate, little emperor that he is, has not met a single edible item that he did not want to fry, and every night we would end up with grease all over the sink, and I finally had had enough.  I tried one of those industrial-strength unclogging solutions from the supermarket, but it did not do the trick.  So I asked the office to send someone up to check it out.

I came home to a huge disaster: two burly guys covered in what I could only hope was silt, two gaping holes in the wall, and not only was the kitchen sink backed up, our bathroom sink was now backed up as well, and so were our next-door neighbor’s.  Something went horribly horribly wrong somewhere.

I was so looking forward to making Colombian-style beef-bone soup.  It’s just soup, really–I’m only trying to impress people *grins* and I only know it because a Colombian neighbor once made it for me.  It is made with plantain and yuca root, which is just balinghoy or some variety of it.  I planned to throw in lentils just so I could actually eat something; I am a fan of neither yuca nor plantain, but I do think they add flavor.  I ended up having a burrito instead, and then I went drinking wine at a neighbor’s, because I did not want to stay in the apartment while the plumbers worked.  I plan to finally make the soup tonight and I can only hope that the lentils have not germinated in the fridge, as they’ve been sitting in water for two days now.

(P.S.  Absolutely… delicious, is what my Chinese neighbor said when he dropped by as I was sitting down to eat, and I asked him to try the soup.  Ha ha.)

I should be sleeping, but I couldn’t wait to share the pics I took with my tripod, whose flexible legs came in very handy.  I took this pic at a rooftop bar, with the camera perched on top of a railing.  More pics later.

8.20.09: More pics, as promised.

I bought a little tripod (on sale, $16). Its legs are flexible, so it doesn’t require a flat surface, and with some manipulation you can even wrap it around something–in this case a half-full bottle of really good, inexpensive wine from Chile. How sad would it be if I started taking pictures of myself?  Oh wait, I already did *wink wink*.  Ha ha.  But only because I’m starting to tire of swimming and yoga, and I wanted evidence that at some point in my life, I at least tried to take care of myself.  Ha ha. Wait, that doesn’t sound right.  Ha ha.  Just so it’s clear, I did not buy the tripod so I can take pictures of myself.  I only thought that after it arrived in the mail, but whatever.  Ha ha.  I plan to take the tripod to a rooftop bar next week, so I can finally take pretty, long-exposure pictures of the city at night.