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 | Sometimes I go whole days
listening bored, half sleep
I won't say anything
that's worth a thing to me
One day, suddenly, time
took a turn that once felt so brief
I blinked to see polite ghosts fading quickly
What begins as an unguarded
train of thoughts slowly can become
an addiction to the slumber
of disconnection and the resonance
of memory that no longer has a shape
but keeps you numb through
the hours till gone is another day
Be aware, my darling
these things I say I mean
are just traces of something
I long to feel again
I see our time expand
in the air almost forcibly,
spreading thinner till it dissolves completely
--Half Asleep, by School of Seven Bells
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On My Soapbox, If Anyone Can See Me
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Jul 8, 2008 5:29 pm
3598 Views
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OK, I am probably going to tick off a lot of smokers pontificating about this, but what the hey.
My mother was a smoker. She started smoking when she was in her 30s, hiding in the bathroom so my father wouldn't find out. Which isn't to say he was anti-smoking in the first place, since he was puffing up to 2 packs a day back then. He just hated the idea of women lighting up.
We grew up seeing our father smoke everywhere in the house, and our mother lighting up furtively wherever she could. Every time we kids would ask her to stop, she would dismiss it saying, "Oh, I only smoke because I hate the smell of the bathroom." Which was strange, because she always made sure our bathrooms smelled of Glade. So we were thinking, why not just stop using Glade if you hated the smell of the bathroom?
Eventually when that excuse wouldn't pan anymore she would flippantly quip, "Everyone's going to die anyway."
What she didn't realize then was that not everyone died equally.
Statistics show that smokers who die before they're 70 on average lose about 21 years of their lives due to smoking. One in two long-term smokers will die prematurely ‒ half of these in middle age. World-wide, almost 5 million die prematurely each year as a result of smoking. Based on current trends, this will rise to 10 million within 20 years.
But this is none of my business, really--if people want to kill themselves, fine. Who am I to stand in the way of self-imposed long term suicide?
What gets me is this--most of the smokers I know say the same thing my mother said so flippantly back when she could still talk. "Everyone's going to die anyway," as they take another drag.
But what if you don't get that quick, instant death?
What if you don't just keel over and die right off the bat? What if, like my mother, you survive your smoking-induced stroke, so you linger for the next three years, half-paralyzed, immobile, someone else washing your bum because you can't do it anymore, unable to talk, can't kill yourself because you can't move (though you want to, because you've always said to your kids you'd rather kill yourself than be like this), fed through a feeding tube, wasting away for God knows how much longer?
And in the meantime the people who love you have to live with seeing this every day, their hearts breaking as you deteriorate one painful, tiny bit at a time, death dragged out in increments.
In the past three years I have had to watch my mother lose one part of herself here and there. Just this year we've had to sit through the painful spectacle of her going off in peals of prolonged hysterical laughter for no apparent reason, wondering how much of her is still left in her mind, because the massive blood clot that hit her brain damaged the entire left side of it in 2005. We've had to contend with her wasting away with osteoporosis, simply because she's been bedridden for 3 years, and no matter what you do, you can't prevent that, despite all the physical therapy and calcium supplements she's had. So these days we very gingerly lift her when we clean her, always aware of the danger that her hips could break any time, fragile as her bones are now.
It's taken a toll on her. It's taken a toll on us. All because she thought, "Everyone's going to die anyway," as she lit up another one.
Please. Stop smoking.
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55
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Trying To Calm Down
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Jul 6, 2008 9:22 pm
4251 Views
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My Mom is in the hospital. Under observation due to infection. I'm freaking out. She had major chills and labored breathing yesterday. 73 and half paralyzed due to a major stroke in 2005. Condition a bit more stable today, but I'm still freaking out.
Did I ever mention I'm the ultimate worrywart when it comes to my family?
Can't think straight--so will cut this short.
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68
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Ennui
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Jul 4, 2008 9:30 am
2990 Views
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I think I'm all blogged out. Has this ever happened to you? I keep thinking, oh, I'll write about this--then I go, naaaah, boring.
I just might blog about soybeans.
*blah*
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51
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Avenue Q
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Jun 26, 2008 8:28 am
3109 Views
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My law partner Gin was dragged out of her place by her gay best friend, N--right at the height of Typhoon Frank--to watch the musical play Avenue Q, because he suddenly had an extra ticket since another friend of his who was supposed to go with him couldn't make it through the flooding in the city. So off she went in the seething downpour, and had so much fun that of course she had to tell me all about it, pointing me to the tube so I could check out the songs.
Unfortunately, by the time she regaled me about the play (complete with her own performances of the songs), it had since completed its Manila run and moved on to Singapore (yoohoo, WHF!).
Its own website describes it thus--
"AVENUE Q is the story of Princeton, a bright-eyed college grad who comes to New York City with big dreams and a tiny bank account. He soon discovers that the only neighborhood in his price range is Avenue Q; still, the neighbors seem nice. There's Brian the out-of-work comedian and his therapist fianceé Christmas Eve; Nicky the good-hearted slacker and his roommate Rod -- a Republican investment banker who seems to have some sort of secret; an Internet addict called Trekkie Monster; and a very cute kindergarten teaching assistant named Kate. And would you believe the building's superintendent is Gary Coleman?!? (Yes, that Gary Coleman.) Together, Princeton and his newfound friends struggle to find jobs, dates, and their ever-elusive purpose in life."
It's like Sesame Street if it was written by Howard Stern, since it uses muppets in the performance, but the songs, oh, the songs--they just crack me up. One of the funniest in the play is called "The Internet Is For Porn", and please, do look it up in the tube--find the one that says "Audio" beside the title so you can get the clear original version.
And then you can sing this line with me--
"Me up all night hugging me horn for porn, porn, porn!" ♫
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45
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My Life As A Wannabe Teenage Rock Star
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Jun 20, 2008 7:23 pm
3409 Views
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So I was driving to pick up my youngest yesterday and was tuned to this radio station playing 80s music, when Billy Idol's Rebel Yell came on, and memories of my college days--back when I was carefree and weighed 92 pounds even with my shoes on--came flooding back.
18 at the time, I was a young and hip vocalist with a cool guitarist boyfriend, and we were gearing up for our University sponsored Battle of the Bands that day. The song line-up the band had decided on was bound to kick serious ass, and guaranteed to be a crowd pleaser. Our drummer, B, who had fantasies of becoming the female equivalent of Stewart Copeland, insisted on Quiet Riot's Cum On Feel Da Noize. Lead guitarist boyfriend F wanted Billy Idol's Rebel Yell. Keyboardist and college best friend S wanted Pat Benatar's Hit Me With Your Best Shot. And me, the one who was going to put my vocal chords through all this torture, wasn't even given a vote.
3 o'clock, 4 hours till the event, and I'm sitting on a salon chair being given the make-over by guitarist boyfriend's hairdresser cousin. Guitarist boyfriend wanted my hair teased a la Billy Idol's lead guitarist Steve Stevens, so two hours and practically one entire can of Aqua Net later, I hopped off from the chair looking like a walking black cotton candy on a stick. Wait, no, scratch that--with my little puff sleeved square necked bare midriff stretch shirt, striped tights and boots, heavy make up and cloud of stiffly teased hair, I looked like a Goth version of a cross between Little Bo Peep and Gene Simmons' bottom half gone terribly wrong. But as long as boyfriend thought I looked reaaaaaaaally cool, that was all that mattered to me.
We were third in line to play. I kept sucking on ginger cubes and using sign language to reply to people backstage so as to conserve my voice. Finally, we went onstage and, adrenaline pumping, launched into Pat Benatar, and the crowd went wild.
First song down, crowd reaction amazing--we were pumped when we started Rebel Yell while I prowled the stage, playing to the audience, feeding off the frenetic energy and giving it my all, pushing my voice to the extreme.
At that time I wore hard contact lenses, because my eyesight was so bad that wearing soft ones kept making my grade go up. The upside was that the hard lens pressing against my cornea moderated the deterioration somewhat, but the downside was that the lens on either eye had a tendency to either pop out or get lodged in the corners of my eyes at the most inopportune moments.
Mid-way through Cum On Feel The Noize, it happened--the false eyelashes made me blink a bit too fast and pop went my left contact lens. I froze while singing--my depth perception suddenly compromised, panic setting in as my vision went haywire, the left eye blurred, the right eye clear, and with all the stage lights and strobe confusing me as to where the edge of the stage was, I stopped jumping around and started taking cautious steps. The audience felt it, saw me fumbling like some half-blind bat, and the performance went flat.
Needless to say, we lost. And in between recriminations from my bandmates, I developed laryngitis.
Guitarist boyfriend never blamed me about the whole thing, but three months later, he dumped me when he formed a new band and met the sister of his new vocalist. The rest of our band disbanded then.
Which is most likely why I'm a lawyer now and not screaming my head off singing onstage.
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54
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Pimping Elricardo's Sizzling Sausage
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Jun 13, 2008 7:02 am
3099 Views
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Step right up, folks! See the Brit bloke with a frying pan that's hardly big enough to contain his hunkawunka burnin' log o' love! Feast your eyes as our favorite Willie Wonka bares (pardon the pun) almost his all just for our entertai..., I mean, enlightenment, at Silly Snapshots & Clever Quips Contest, Part 1.
I say, vote for the man so he can have gold balls to go with that silver frying pan, and help him start a trend! Never has a man been so self effacing in showing his swollen pride. Never has a blogger been so fraught with courage as to display nethers that would rival the Netherlands. Don't even stop to ponder the philosophy of whether he has a pair of eggs nestling inside that frying pan and asking yourself if he choked the chicken first--just go out there and vote!!
Or we'll have Mutley fart on you.
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43
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The Things They're Selling In Manila These Days Take Three
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Jun 10, 2008 10:25 pm
3846 Views
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If this doesn't make the hearts of foot-fetishists-slash-merkin-fanatics beat a little faster, I don't know what will. That what-not in the picture, in case you're wondering, is a pair of mop slippers.
You heard me right--mop slippers.
Now everywhere I walk in the house, I'm mopping as I go, and I not only bought one, I bought FOUR pairs, so that all the grown ups in the house wear them. Sometimes we look like a convention of Muppet Monster Feet, shuffling along, each at our little corner, and I'm thinking--while we're making sure the floor is clean enough to eat from--that all we need now is The Muppet Show theme song.
I'm falling in love with my pair. I'm growing seriously dependent on them. I can now empathize with the obsession Dexter's mom (from Dexter's Laboratory) has for her yellow cleaning gloves. I've actually caught myself trying to do an ice skating glide across our living room that would do Michelle Kwan proud (hey, we almost have the same size schnoz anyway) while One Day More from Les Miz' 10th Anniversary Concert pounded on.
So if you'll excuse me, I have to practice my pirouette.
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55
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Perceptions
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Jun 3, 2008 7:34 pm
4821 Views
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OK, taking a poll here–how many of you think this cartoon accurately depicts how men and women perceive themselves?
I look at this cartoon and think to myself about how it's been true in a lot of cases. Not all, of course, but I've encountered it enough to make me realize it's a prevailing mindset among both genders.
I often wonder why we women are so much harder on ourselves than men are. I may be wrong, but given the environment most women are raised in, most of us find that we've been, the minute we're born, expected to grow up pretty. Not smart, not accomplished, not capable–but PRETTY. (Quick, how many of you have pictures as a baby in a cute ruffly dress with tiny pink bows in your otherwise almost bald head? And how many of you have had your daughters posed this way?)
It's given women a complex. I mean, just look at how I go on about my schnoz.
Could it also be because women are harder on other women than men will ever be? Women size each other up in a way men don't do to other men. We check out each other's clothes, hair, make-up, shoes, shoulder bag, bling, and the man the other gal's with. We can put our fellow women down (in private of course, with our girlfriends) so thoroughly you'd think we're not even in the same gender team. And it starts early. As my friend, who has two daughters and a son, all of them still in grade school, says, “Boys beat each other up and that's it, it's over, it's done with. Girls engage in bitchy put-downs, shutting other girls out and forming cliques, and the damage done is much, much more insidious.”
I wonder where we women learned this from?
On the flipside, I've seen male friends in possession of such monumental self-assurance it beggars belief. I had a law school classmate, whom I shall call J, who was short, not that brainy (he barely made it every sem) and quite frankly, resembled Daffy Duck. We gals in law school didn't want to have anything to do with him, but it didn't stop him from trying to ask most of us out, and getting miffed as to why no one would go out with him. It didn't even dent his ego one bit, and eventually, years after law school, he managed to snag a flight attendant 4 inches taller and a decade younger than him, and would preen in self satisfaction parading her about.
Another former male classmate of mine, T, already balding and beginning to have a paunch even back then, would constantly go after model types, all at least a decade younger than he was, with the utmost conviction that they would not be able to resist his charms.
I also wonder why it seems as if society, at least this one I'm in, seems to penalize women who over-achieve. Consider Y, our batch valedictorian–drop dead gorgeous, old rich, with a pedigree that would grant her entree to the most exclusive stomping grounds of the beautiful people of Manila (grandfather was a former Supreme Court justice, father was a former matinee idol), smart as hell, tall and model thin, with a fashion sense straight out of Vogue. And yet, during our Annual Blue Roast for graduating batches, she was actually jokingly nominated as “Most Likely To Be An Old Maid.”
Too rich, too smart, too beautiful, said someone--and yes, it was a woman who said that, quite cattily too.
She eventually took up her Masters in Law in NYC, and years later, met a minor member of some European royalty, eventually marrying him last year. Too big for this small pond here, someone said when we heard, and yes, it was--again--a woman who said that.
One thing that struck me, 12 years after graduating from law school, was the number of female classmates of mine who are still single, even after all these years. My male classmates, almost to a man, are all married, majority of them to women outside of law school, to women much younger than they are, and very pretty women, too, mind--trophy wives, I would suppose. I look at this and realize that in a sense, when it comes to finding partners, most men who are achievers find themselves spoilt for choices, while women who do the same suddenly find themselves pariahs of some sort. You only have to look at the glaring disparity between the number of married male and female lawyers and doctors to see this dynamic at work.
Finally, there's aging, which is, let's face it, kinder on men than it will ever be on women. I've heard it said quite often enough how men seem to grow more dignified as they age while women just...sag. Even in Hollywood, leading men still manage to romance nubile young nymphets onscreen (and off) at, say, the age of 50 while most leading ladies start getting mother roles when they hit the half century mark. It's even more true in Philippine movies--we have aging male action stars still whooping it up onscreen with their guns and their girls while Ms. Pretty Young Thing who has now hit her thirties is finding herself playing the role of the benevolent aunt/mother/evil stepmother.
(By the way, does this blog make me look fat?)
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68
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Bomb Scare
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May 28, 2008 7:46 am
4595 Views
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I can laugh about this now---well, actually, I was laughing about it earlier, too. Couldn't help myself, if you must know.
3:30 PM today and hubby comes rushing up to our place, telling us we had to leave, NOW, because apparently some idiot called up one of our tenants downstairs and told them he had planted a bomb in the building and was going to blow them all up. Part of me thought it could be a hoax, but then, you never know, so I immediately started gathering the boys and the maids and told them to grab whatever they could.
And then my youngest started yelling, "WAIT, WHAT ABOUT THE FAMILY MONEY???"
I stopped dead in my tracks and went, "Family MONEY? What family MONEY?"
So he rushes back into his room and grabs...
...his piggy bank.
And I just lost it and cracked up.
Bomb squad came by to talk to hubby and the tenant while we were gone, and declared the building bomb free. Eldest moped that he would've wanted to see the bomb-sniffing dogs. Youngest went around saying to anyone who would listen, "You're all safe now!" while munching on a bag of potato chips and clutching his favorite Lego creation, the only other things he brought along apart from the "family MONEY".
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56
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