HULI!

...na naman ako. For beating the red light--my third for the same offense over three years. The violation, according to the man in blue at the corner of Cubao, reckless driving...my, my, the only time I am reckless and I get caught. Not true, actually, I am very reckless in the comforts of my mind, good thing they don't give tickets for that.

Horoscope Junky Goes Clubbing

My horoscope said: A friend will help you learn about a foreign culture or subculture you have been curious about.


Funny because that night I found myself at, read this, the EMBASSY at the FORT. Well, actually, my friends went in while I went home. Boring boring me. But I had a very good reason...Dean a.k.a. Marko could not get in with his oversized shorts. Me to him: maybe if you like wear your shorts na pakigol (really short ba) and hike up your shirt to show a little tummy, like all those slim, leggy, girls prancing about, then they would let you in. The sign outside was very specific: No oversized shorts. There, less is more, I guess.


This Embassy thing all started when Des, who is a nurse in London and was in town for a vacation, said she wanted to go to a disco. I was blast-ed to the past-ed.


Disco?!? The last disco I went to must have been at Spacer in Tacloban, beside the bowling-an, when I was 14. No, wait, Jaleux along Qeuzon Avenue in front of Burger Machine. No, the last one was at the GARAGE in Carigara, formerly the town's moviehouse that was converted to a warehouse-type disco where women in knee-high black boots and short shorts belted out LAKLAK.


Ruby to me: You don't go to a disco now, you go clubbing.


Ah, clubbing. So that's what they call it now. And so that night, after dinner at a Spanish restaurant in Shnagri-la, we decided to check out the Embassy, based on the recommendation of another highschool classmate who occasionaly goes there with her expat friends. That's the only reason I go, she insisted. Does not want to be a clubber, this one. hehehe.

What I know about that place and that subculture, I get from my once-a-month showbiz tsismis viewing , where the Embassy would be featured from time to time for brawls involving some hotheaded, egotistic artistas.

So our excursion to the Fort extended my immersion of that foreign culture (kay damo foreigners, hekhekhek), and even if I did not actually go inside the Embassy, watching the people outside was already ah, a new experience.

We sat for a good hour at the Cafeteria, the one beside the Embassy, waiting for the clock to strike 12 so the cinderallas (me, pearl, mike, marko) can go home and they (des, roch and bf homer, cha) can proceed next door. That one hour, in between sips of mai tai, we people-watched. I have never seen so many well-dressed party people in one place (but that's because you don't go anywhere, Tonette would say).


All the people there, they all looked liked they jumped out of the fashion magazines. All the latest fashion featured in last week's People's Magazine, US weekly, OK Magazine that I read in my dentist's clinic were all being cat-walked at the Fort. The in crowd. ( in to what?)

Pearl to me: If you are young and you belong to this crowd, it must be difficult trying to keep up. Me to her: Well, they are rich socialites. Pearl to me: No, not everyone who comes here are rich. Some just, you know, keep up with the latest trend.

Ruby to me, the day after: Describe them to me. Me to her: Ok, remember the yuppies of Makati who went to Streetlife? The higher-end of that crowd (I know, I am outdated but you know what I mean). Age range- 20-30s. Have disposable income/allowance. Reads Cosmo/GQ. Metrosexuals. Fashionistas. Manila's own Paris Hiltons.

Not that there is anything wrong with that. The only point I am trying to make is, it was interesting to see people very different from my usual crowd (ok, I do not have enough friends to make up a crowd according to standard definitions, but you know what i mean). And I was amazed how much a place could actually homogenize a crowd, or the other way around.

When my friends and I go out, we go to bars where beer sells for under 35 pesos (if we are feeling a little rich we can even shell out 100 for cover charge). And the usual people I go out with give the exact amount, down to the last peso, to their share of the bill. I was definitely out of my turf.

But that does not make us better people, only poorer people. It also does not mean they are better dressed, just more expensively dressed. Balit, all this only means that the Embassy is not my kind of place. I had fun though, the company was great, the conversation even better, the venue did not matter.

This weekend, I will wash off the taste of that place with a little dash of James Taylor at My Bro's mustache. Or drink tanduay at the kanto (ay, may city ordinance pala against that and there are no kanto boys in my neighborhood). Or grab a beer at the News Desk where lonely, old, desk editors hibernate.

Until the next invitation to go clubbing comes.

Waiting

There is nothing worse than waiting for something to happen when you know exactly what and how it is going to happen. I wish I was made of that stuff that allows others to say, I think it is going to be better this time. But I can’t. I am a good student, I learn from experience. That is why I do not eat ampalaya. That is why I do not drink and drive anymore (well, almost but not quite). That is why I am here, right now, almost sick with anxiety. I almost wish that when I wake up, it would be Saturday, and I would go walk Mang Pedring, buy banana cue and mango shake at the UP shopping center, and wonder to myself, where did Friday go?

Beating the Sunday Blues

“This was a good Sunday,” my housemate said as we arrived from a father’s day lunch-dinner at my Uncle Nino’s place. That morning she was lamenting that she had the Sunday blues yet again. What made it better for her was belting out the Queen’s I wanna break free and gulping down five bottles of beer. While I, I buried my blues with a little induced happiness courtesy of a friend’s magic box.

Sunday blues, we concluded a long time ago, is an affliction of the migrants of this city like we are, or anyone who has left the shore of the heart where they have roots (not my phrase, I only borrowed from Pablo Neruda).

(I still consider myself an alien in Manila, even if I literally have roots here —the vines-with-yellow-flowers I had planted when I moved into my apartment three years ago. But figuratively speaking, I still feel my roots are in Tacloban—but then again that’s another story).

Mine started when I left home for college and transplanted myself in Quezon City. Every Sunday, for all of my college years and beyond, I would wake up with a hole in the pit of my stomach and by mid-afternoon, the dread from that pit would have already risen up to constrict my throat. It was the psychological/physiological effect of homesickness that hits me hardest on a Sunday. I come from a conventional extended family that would converge where the Queen Bee was. So in our case, our Queen Bee was my grandma who lived at home so my aunts, uncles, cousins would almost always have lunch or dinner at home after Sunday mass.

So being away from home meant spending what used to be family-Sundays either nursing a bad hangover or going to church alone and having lunch at Rodics. To manage the blues, I used to go to the last mass, because at that time of the day, there were less families in attendance, more singles present, until I stopped going to church altogether (but again, that’s another story).

Another manifestation of this syndrome is the dread of facing another Monday of school or work. We (my fellow Waray migrants) have been lamenting that if we had the comforts of home, manic Mondays won’t faze us at all.

Now, after more than a decade here in Manila, we still have the occasional Sunday blues. It is not as regular as before, but when it hits, it can still be as bad as the first time I spent a Sunday alone in my dormitory at 16.

For a long time, I have always thought that the main reason why 80% of the tight circle of friends I keep are Waray or Bisaya was because my Tagalog is almost hopeless. Well, ok, that too. But then, I realized that this syndrome is the reason why I have built a solid support group of friends who spoke my language and who suffered from the same affliction—my own little family of rootless people to help me manage the Sunday blues.

Later on, as I traveled more and more, I have seen the same Sunday blues that afflict me and my friends along the sidewalks and parks of HongKong where Filipino workers congregate; in the Chinese restaurants in Saipan, where Chinese workers converge on their day-off from the factories; in Catholic churches where Pinoy expats of Indonesia and Cambodia go to be with other Pinoys. All of them trying to beat the blues by recapturing the familiarity of home in the adobo they share for lunch, or in the gossips they exchange in their local language, or by just basking in the collective cloud of homesickness and longing that permeate from the pores of their fellow migrants.

So like the migrant workers based in far, far, away land, my friends and I have already devised ways to beat the Sunday blues—usually coffee at brunch or late afternoon with family we consider our friends or with friends we consider our family would be enough to do the trick. And if we are lucky, we completely forget it as we did last Sunday. We will probably do this until the time comes when we return home or when we stop resisting from making this place our home, whichever comes first.