Laughin' with your pretty mouth
Hateful life first oppresses and then soothes as fancy takes it.
Poverty and power it melts them like ice.
Fate – monstrous and empty, you whirling wheel, you are malevolent!
Well-being is vain and always fades to nothing, shadowed and veiled,
you plague me too!
Now through the game, I bring my bare back to your villainy.
Fate is against me in health and virtue,
driven on and weighted down, always enslaved.
So at this hour, without delay, pluck the vibrating strings.
Since Fate strikes down the strong man,
Everyone weep with me!
Among all the good things in life, the following are on top of my list: old friends, cold beer, fresh breeze on a calm and quiet evening, bursts of uncensored laughter, and good conversations.
Ah, good conversations – they are extremely rare these days. In an age of perfunctory relationships and shallow interpersonal connections, where most of our interactions with other people are shady and self-centered, finding someone you can truly talk to is highly improbable it’s almost like winning a P200M lotto jackpot. In today’s superficial universe, intelligent people who may not necessarily agree with you, understand or condone you, but who can empathize and connect with the workings of your twisted mind, is an endangered species, perhaps more scarce than the African Black Rhino or the Chinese Giant Panda.
Last weekend, I was lucky enough to encounter one of these endangered kinds. As it turned out, Luck is a strange thing. While the universe runs on strict principles of cause and effect, sometimes we find ourselves caught in odd circumstances - those ones that do not make sense at all. Take Randomness, for example. In a universe where entropy is the law, and even the smallest of molecules have a tendency towards disorder, it escapes my brain how two molecules operating on Brownian motion can actually collide and result in some kind of an atomic interaction that leads to a boom, whatever that is!
Blame it on Randomness. After all, it doesn't really matter who and what we collide with. What matters is who or which of those we collide with can join us in this perpetual Brownian motion of our existence. I don't mind being a victim of Randomness once in a while. If the random connections we make result in thought-provoking conversations over doses of cold beer that would have normally knocked the consciousness out of you, well, that isn't too bad, is it?
Anyway, last weekend was a rare one. I exceeded my limit for words spoken in a day, surpassed my liver's capacity to produce alcohol dehydrogenase but surprisingly stayed sane despite the nausea, and was totally unaware that the clock has struck 4:30AM - the first dawn that I was ever by Manila Bay without my running shoes on.
After the alcohol was out of my system, I was still lightheaded and floating. My legs felt like lead and it was impossible to work. I was sick. Right then and there, I knew what it was all about. I was having symptoms similar to my dreaded but recurrent Post-Travel Depression Syndrome. Psychologists say that people who travel may suffer from post-vacation blues after returning to a normal routine from a journey, especially if it was a pleasurable one. The longer the trip, the more intense the blues will be.This time, I didn't travel. But what I had was so much like it.
And then I knew. I'm not changing my mind about the beauty of a good conversation. But the trouble with having experienced one is this - everything else you hear around you becomes small talk, and you realize that the language of the outside world is plain gibberish.Going back to the real world takes a lot of getting used to, huh?
The trouble with a good thing is that you will never get enough of it.
In my chronic struggle with obesity, I have been yoyo-ing from being morbidly obese to being hideously fat. Either way, I’ve always been fat. This has been the case for the last 23 years, since I had my last normal BMI when I was in Grade 1. As far as I can remember, I was already heavier than a sack of rice since I was 8 years old. During that time, when kids my age were still being thrown around by their dads like little monkeys moving from one tree branch to another, I was already stuck on the ground, moping like a depressed Mommy King-Kong who can’t heave herself up to the lowest branch of a tree strong enough to carry a ton.
So when the well-meaning, health-conscious IM residents announced that they are holding a second season of the IM Biggest Loser contest, I was one of the first to sign up. Again. Last March, these residents, who, for some strange reasons, suddenly became staunch advocates of healthy lifestyles, launched the first season of IMBL with much fanfare, and I also enthusiastically joined in. After 3 weeks of gorging on Sibutramine, Metformin, and various diuretics, I had a bout of annoying premature ventricular contractions that paralyzed me for a day. So despite the loss of more than 5 kgs, I spent the next weeks regaining what I had lost, feasting on chicharon, lechon, and deep-fried galunggong over heaps of steaming rice during my leave. By the start of May, I was back to where I started – all four weeks of running along Roxas all the way to Mall of Asia, horrendous starvation, and ridiculously expensive weight-loss pharmacologic armamentarium – flushed down my Xenical-induced-lipid-laden-feces-stained toilet bowl.
Ugh! Yuck! I’m exaggerating of course. But you get the idea, don’t you? I’m fat! I’ve been fat for as long as I can remember. And I absolutely hate it!
I want to wear that bikini. I want to walk around PGH wearing nothing under my white coat except an ultra-short, spaghetti-strapped dress, uhm, negligee!
So I signed up. After my embarrassing stint with IMBL season 1, I’m trying my luck again in IMBL season 2. The pot money is almost three times that of IMBL 1, and the contestants are a gazillion times more competitive. There’s a huge chance that I wasted another one thousand bucks over a senseless competition I have no chance of winning. But who cares? I want that bikini!
One shouldn’t count thy chicks before thy eggs are hatched. But I have to lose all this fat to save my eggs, right?
And with a 26K pot, who knows what I can get if I win? Perhaps, I might actually come across a hot man for sale - and finally afford it.
**********
In five days, I’ll be having the time of my life.
(Enter David Cook singing “I’ll taste every moment and live it out loud, I know this is the time, this is the time of my life…”
And Carrie Underwood singing “A moment like this, some people wait a lifetime for a moment like this…”)
I can already imagine myself, all my overweight, clumsy self – up on a giant billboard over EDSA, all smiling and Sarah-Geronimo-like gorgeous. By Saturday, I’ll be a superstar, a stunning supermodel, I’ll be the queen of the world!
In five days, I’ll be flying down south. And when I step off the plane, there they will be, from opposite spectra of my life, both frozen in a single moment – the two men I adore, both dashing and debonair, impossibly straight and still single –and they are both so into me.
As my two best buddies, that is.
Huhuhu, what can an ordinary-looking nobody like me expect, of course. Sigh. Twice the dream, double the tragedy, and multiply the pain many times over. Ugh.
Move over, Kris Aquino, the drama is mine this time. Not!
I need to get a haircut. This sweltering summer heat is rendering my withered and mummified brain useless that I could not think beyond the blistering El Nino sun and the persistent and annoying beading of sweat on my brow. Even the art of staying still that I have long ago mastered is futile in decreasing the temperature to within physiologic levels. This heat is so oppressive that a lot of women I know are shedding off their prized and expensively pampered manes for the chic and slightly more summer-friendly bob. But that is not the reason why I need that haircut.
You see I need to return to Earth. That’s the literal translation for the warning my brain is currently sending me every day. If my brain is a Jejemon, that message would have looked like this: “eow poh, ang jaba na ng jair mhow, jejeje”.
Let me tell you why.
After years of traveling on my own, and whining about the loneliness and the ludicrous expense of solo backpacking, this June will be an entirely different story. The sudden change of my traveling affairs is so shocking and revolutionary in nature that even as early as today, the first day of June, and still a long way before my planned adventure, I can barely contain my excitement. I finally found that ever elusive, first-rate travel company. For this upcoming Independence Day long weekend, I and my elite travel group will be exploring South Cotabato, Sarangani, and General Santos City – which incidentally, is the realm of the Greatest Hero of Jejemons - Congressman-elect Manny Pacquiao.
Before I completely spill the beans on this trip and this premium, hand-picked group and inadvertently spoil everything, I’d keep my mouth shut. My recent rendezvous with disenchantment and heartbreak has taught me a lot of things. I have stopped crafting plans that will only get spoiled. I have stopped making expectations that will only fall short. I have stopped hoping to avoid disappointment.
Suffice it to say, what could be better than traveling with two of your greatest friends? Traveling with two of your hottest, most amazing, smartest, coolest, cutest, single male friends! One of them is someone I have known more than half of my life, the other one is someone I met in the strangest most outrageously unexpected way. But both are wonderful people – definitely the two men I measure everyone else against (the third is my dad). And they both happen to be straight!!! Waaaah! Ang haba na talaga ng hair ko.
Oh well. Earth to Jean. Earth to Jean.
Today, in preparation for that much-awaited trip, I went to my hairdresser and got that much needed haircut.
Oh well.
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at where we started and know the place for the first time."- TS Eliot
