Over 60 and swooning

“Karma” – my BFF Gabby calls it.

She couldn’t relate to me, she says – which, shorn of diplomatese, may have meant she laughed at me -- in my Dao Ming Zu days.

Those were days I’d go home early to catch plays and replays of “Meteor Garden” where Taiwanese actor Jerry Yan (aka Dao Ming Zu) strutted, with his magnificent abs, big hair, and brooding, slit-eyed looks, into and under the skin not only of the saccharine Shan Cai but also of his huge audience of women, young and old and, yes, older. Days all I wanted to do at lunchtime was to recount the latest Dao Ming Zu tragedy or crisis with office friends, never mind if all of us watched the show the night before. Days I’d watch Meteor Garden episodes on CD which I cajoled my niece Maila to lend me and which I didn’t return though she more than cajoled. Days I’d shop at Bench, where Jerry was poster boy, only so I could grab a free poster.

Of course, it wasn’t the first time I swooned over a 20 year old. There was Diether Ocampo back in his Ang TV and Gimik days; and before him Romnick Sarmenta; and before him Dranreb Belleza; and before him …. ooops, my memory fails me.

She has been karma’d, Gabby confesses, because now, she’s hopelessly in love with K-pop idol Jang Geun Seok of “You’re Beautiful” fame. Hah, I wanted to gloat, JGS is only a Korean reproduction of my DMZ – a second rate, trying-hard copy cat.

This must be second childhood, Gabby frets. “I bought a lot of JGS stuff. I listen to his soundtracks and constantly watch his manhwas (Korean dramas). He has a new one showing here now,” she adds, referring of course to Korea where she is an exchange professor.

Gabby offers she is an escapist-dreamer whose outlook in life is “that there should always be magic and that anything is possible” -- her way of explaining why she is hooked to the young Kor-Kor idol. She is not keen on reality, she says, because reality for others is not HER reality.

Unlike Gabby, I don’t shun roller-coaster reality, even if some of the bumps really did hurt. It has brought enough high and magical moments, to savor while they lasted and to re-savor in the remembering. No, life has been good or has evened out for me – with its admixture of joys and griefs, surprises and disappointments, and gains and losses. Truly, I have sometimes surprised myself how well I played some tough cards life dealt me.

(Which reminds me how an online scrabble buddy recently complained about the tight board we were playing -- you know, the kind where you could only move edgewise. Don’t you just hate it? -- she asked. I replied honestly that I have learned to enjoy the challenge of difficult boards and bad tiles where I have to dip deep into my ingenuity, stock of words, and other resources to form a "respectable” word without passing or exchanging tiles.)

But I escape too sometimes. There is also this secret place in my mind, that I stealthily enter when I am alone, where everything is magical and where I am young forever and the season is always summer.

Is it horribly wrong – this living and dreaming-daydreaming, waking up and then starting the cycle again? Is it so ridiculous and laughable – this delighting in everything that elicits a smile and perhaps some kilig, regardless if it's Jerry Yan, Jan Geun Seok, an old flame, a virtual friend, or some other who has caught our fancy?

There is a secret chamber inside everyone -- young and old, male and female, rich and poor, wise or not so -- that one takes refuge in when the going gets rough or merely tiresome.

We don’t stop dreaming or swooning just because we are 50, 60, or older.

Maybe I should watch “You’re Beautiful” one of these days and then …. who knows?

Photo: from crienglish.com

Chronically lost and officially sexy? (Understanding geographic dyslexia)

Si Pining, kaibigan at kabarkada ko noong hayskul, ay tsampyon sa pagiging ligawin – 50 daw ang nagpahahayag ng pagibig sa kanya noong hayskul, at di pa kabilang dito ang mga torpeng binatilyong pasulyap-sulyap lang sa kanyang direksyon.

Limampu?! – ang tanong ko sa kanya habang halos magkandapatid ang aking ugat sa gulat o ngitngit (o inggit). Hindi ko masabi sa bruha: “Eh kaya pala walang natira sa aking boylets!”

Sa sobrang pagka-allergic ni Pining sa manliligaw, pinagupit niya ang kanyang mahaba at kulay uling na buhok nang tumuntong siya ng kolehiyo. Buhok daw kase ang nakahalina sa kanyang mga tagahanga. Hindi pa nagkasya doon, tinago ang balantok na binti sa paldang hanggang sakong ang haba, at sinubsob ang ulo sa mga libro. Kung hindi daw niya ginawa yun, baka hindi siya nakatapos ng pag-aaral. O hindi siya nakatapos nang may karangalan. Istorbo daw kasi ang pagiging ligawin.

Nguni’t sadyang iniligaw ko kayo. Pasensya na, dahil hindi ito ang tipo ng pagka-ligawin na gusto kong tumbukin sa artikulong ito.

Kundi ang tipong pagiging ligawin na sa tingin ko’y ako ang may hawak ng setro at korona, nang walang pangambang may magtatangkang mang-agaw o mag-protesta.

Oo, napaka-ligawin ko. “Nasaan ako?” “Kakanan ba ako, kakaliwa, o dederetso?” “Papunta ba ako o paalis?” Ito ang istorya ng buhay ko. Isang buhay na hitik sa di-mabilang na pagkawala, paghahanap, at muling pagtatagpo – at hindi sa eksistensyal na kahulugan ng mga salitang ito na disin sana ay maipagmamalaki ko kaysa ikahiya.

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LOST! (Geographic Dyslexia)

... He wanders in a fog adrift upon the planet, helpless, praying that just by luck he might stumble across his destination.

- Anne Tyler (in Accidental Tourist, describing main character, Macon Leary)

“Where am I” is a question that has confounded me all my life. A life in which I have lost and found self many times – and not in the existentialist way of philosophers and romantics I would have preferred.

I didn’t know till lately there was a medical term for what afflicts me. For decades, I’d simply call myself the most “ligawin” person in the world. Then I’d add, as though it was the cutest thing to say, that, alas, it had nothing to do with being attractive to guys – unless I count the young men who’d call on an almost daily basis with yet another credit card deal or some other telemarketing proposition.

I am so ligawin I still lose my way around the UP campus after 30 years working there. I am so ligawin I'd enter the main door of an unfamiliar office, transact my business, and then try to let myself out through the door of a conference room right smack at a dozen people all gaping at me. I am so ligawin that when I eat out, I can get lost going back from the comfort room to my table at a big restaurant till my friends are about ready to page me. I am so ligawin I break into cold sweat when I take a cab from a strange town and I can't give the directions the driver expects to get me home.

Aside from board rooms, stock rooms, and other spaces I shouldn’t have entered, I have also tried to climb into cars not ours.

When I am in a strange place and I wish to explore it, I walk a straight path. When I reach a fork, I turn back.

Three times I got lost in Antipolo in May time. Twice in Divisoria during the Christmas rush. Once in a subway in Nagoya, Japan while on official tour. No big deal. I took a cab back to home or hotel, where the first thing I did was to scold my companions for losing me.

I got lost big time in Agoo, La Union at a time only rich and important persons had mobile phones. My sister, her children and I braved humongous crowds and horrendous traffic to witness the phenomenon of the dancing sun and to gawk at Judel, a Bernadette-wannabe. I like to think I saw the sun spin out of orbit for a minute, unless it was just my eyes obliging my overwhelming need for a miracle. I also thought I caught an uncanny whiff of sampaguita flowers, unless someone sprayed bottled scent all over the hillside. Anyway, when the crowds dispersed, we inched our way to where we were parked. Suddenly, my companions sank into the sea of people, whereupon I spent the next two hours trying to fish them out -- them or the car which seemed to have plunged, too -- whichever surfaces first. When it got dark and my limbs were about to crumble, I found a house that offered meals and later agreed to put me up for the night. I made friends with the lady of the house who accompanied me to mass the next morning at the Agoo Cathedral, and thence to the PT & T office where I phoned home, and finally to the terminal to board a Manila-bound bus. After we hugged and said goodbye as though we had been friends for a thousand fortnights rather than overnight, Manang Nida handed me a small box. I have kept her gift rosary made from shell to this day.

At Divisoria Mall, when I gave up looking for friends who strayed as we panic-bought for the holidays, I stumbled across an obscure store selling old inventory of Pollypocket dolls at give-away prices. The finger-sized dolls in compact-shaped doll houses were to-die-for gifts for little girls, of which there were plenty among my grand and god children. When I finally reunited with friends at the end of the shopping day, they drooled over my buys.

"Wandering in a fog adrift" is releasing control, letting the fates take over. It can spring wonderful surprises.

Come to think of it, there have been adventures, not all of them unpleasant, I would have missed if I didn’t have this condition I now know as geographic dyslexia or dysgeographica.

It has given me cold comfort to put a name to this chronic disorientation that follows me about. Warmer comfort is finding out from google searches I am not the most ligawin person in the world. Odd comfort is realizing I am not stupid after all but only minorly impaired in the way that the reading dyslexic and the color blind are.

I don’t know what caused it or if it can be treated. I just know I went to school, held a job, raised a family, and built a social life little encumbered, though sometimes embarrassed, from not knowing what direction I am facing or whether I am coming or going. People around me, except the closest, are none the wiser I am afflicted. Of course, I had to abandon pretensions to be tourist guide or pilot or driver or navigator or traffic policeman. But hey, I can be a travel writer like Macon Leary, the vulnerable Anne Tyler hero (The Accidental Tourist) who can get lost on a road map.

I can even be president, like the world’s most accomplished dyslexic, George W. Bush.

(For more on dysgeographica -- also known as directional dyslexia, also called geographic dyslexia by Anne Tyler -- log on to the exquisitely instructive site of someone similarly afflicted -- poet, writer, editor, and blogger Dr. Metablog.)

Vivid Vignettes of a Vincible Childhood - 1

The Nether World of Our Silong

We used to live in a ramshackle house we had the audacity to call a chalet. Looking back, its only legitimate claim to being a chalet is a six-step stair leading to its front door, posts on its four corners, and a silong less than a meter high.

I loved-hated our silong.

We had slatted floors in parts of our house where coins, keys, and sundry small items would go through accidentally and very often. We, children, had to make a dash for under the house to retrieve whatever fell through the slats, at our elders’ say so. On rainy days, the silong would be puddled with water and mounded with mud. We were obliged to go there, when asked, and get ourselves dirty. Even when it got dark, we went there just the same, if there’s something to retrieve, with a flickering candle and a pounding heart.

But the silong was also a magical place where we let our imagination fly with games of fantasy. We pretended it was prison, and we were all counts of monte cristo. We pretended it was the pit with a pendulum where we mock-tortured each other and from which we foiled each other’s attempts to escape. It was also the place some Count Dracula might sleep and wake thirsty for plasma and the “dungeon” would reverberate with blood-curdling screams.

More placidly in summer, we would spread mats on its earthen floor, and take cool naps in the company of its denizens – lizards, spiders, beetles, snails and – who knows – maybe even little snakes?

Best of all, the silong was a place to gather the cutest little eggs you ever did see – lizard eggs about the size of oval MMs. Better than easter egg hunts, I swear! -- anyhow unheard of then. We gingerly put the fragile little thingies in tiny bamboo baskets and later boiled them in small clay pots. Some boys in the neighborhood might also help us look for the eggs but mostly they hunted for spiders which the silong likewise bred abundantly.

When we girls grew too old to play house and cook lizard eggs, the boys seemed not to weary of spider hunting. “Oh well, boys mature slower than girls” was how we excused them. Until my Ate Mila, always the feisty and smart one in the family, figured it all out. The boys were actually no longer so much interested to catch spiders as to catch a glimpse of skirts and things that skirts are supposed to hide!

Soon after my Ate’s brilliant detective work, our slatted floors gave way to wooden slabs. There was no more reason to go to the nether world of our silong.

Lenten Parody: Good Friday Favored Eats

Fridays are when we almost always have ginisang munggo – usually with tiny hipon and bits of pork or chunks of pig trotters (the lower end of pata). The munggo is either stand alone or accompanied by a second dish of … uhmm … maybe pork adobo or breaded pork chops.

But since yesterday was Good Friday, we had to comply with the Lenten tradition of banishing animal flesh from the dining table. I remember abstinence as a way of gaining spiritual indulgence by not indulging (in pork, beef, lamb, veal or fowl and their ilk). Abstinence is supposed to win us brownie points in Christian virtue and assure us of a ticket for the trip to heaven we expect to take sooner or later.

But who’s kidding who?

Look what we gave up animal meat for yesterday!

Pasta (penne) marinara

Inihaw na panga ng tuna (grilled tuna jaw) from DIL's trip to Davao.

Tinolang tahong (mussels) from the fish stall in the kanto.

Hinalabos na hipon (boiled shrimps) also from the kanto.

Buko pie from Laguna where we visited several churches -- bisita iglesia style -- the day before.

All our favorite seafood we couldn’t indulge in everyday!! And we call this fasting and abstaining.

In past seasons, I have served at one Good Friday meal or another one or more of these: steamed maya-maya coated with mayonnaise and hardboiled eggs, oyster omelet, prawn tempura, chili crabs, broccoli with shrimps and quail eggs, relyenong bangus, pucherong dalag, or pesang isda with miso-kamatis dip. For merienda, there was always ginatang bilo-bilo or home-made halo-halo or grated gabi in uncooked gata topped with crisp pinipig. All elaborate and fancy victuals I usually don’t have the time and patience -- not to mention the budget -- to prepare.

The Doctora-not-quite had reason to mock-complain: “Mommy, this is no way to observe Good Friday. We didn’t go hungry; we over­­­-ate.”

“ Arrggh! There goes my diet,” the Bonch said, her grin contradicting her groan.

True to form, my youngest son, a man of few words, agreed with a double-thumbs up before peeling yet another hipon on his plate.

In her mind, the perpetrator of the Lenten parody, tried to excuse herself with the thought it is not everyday her brood of six gather all together around the table.

And she consoled myself she may have already made the more authentic self-denial by renouncing all through the day the most delicious of online pleasures– internet scrabbling, blogging, Facebook-ing, YM-chatting, G-talking. She broke the 24-hour abstinence from the pc only to google pasta marinara to cook and the 14 stations of the cross to meditate over.

Oooh lala! Didn’t the clock just strike midnight? Excuse me, while I log in to the scrabble club at last, heart pounding, fingers trembling, mouth foaming.

Nnnno, those are not wwwwithdrawal ssssymptoms. And oh nnnno, I'm nnnnnot an a-aaahddict.

(P.S. Here's my recipe for pasta marinara: Gather all seafoods you can get from your pantry. In my case, I grabbed a dozen kani or crabsticks from the ref and filched a bowlful of tahong from the tinolang tahong we were having for lunch and chucked them to add to the half-kilo package of frozen mixed seafoods I got from the supermarket. Wash well and set aside. Saute minced garlic, chopped onions, and sliced tomatoes in 1/2 cup of olive oil. Add cubed carrot, diced celery, sliced button mushrooms, and then all the seafood. Be sure not to overcook the seafood, especially the squid. Drop in a dozen green olives and 2 pieces bayleaf. Pour two cups marinara sauce and one cup tomato sauce. Season with salt, ground pepper and thyme. Optional: Add a tablespoon or two of sugar. Pour over pasta (spaghetti, fettucini or penne) cooked al dente. Serve with grated parmesan cheese.

Collecciones (Collectors, Collectibles, and Collecting Instincts)

My daughter collects abandoned kittens, wounded birds, butterflies with broken wings and such. She feeds and nurses them till they get well or die. Once, she attempted to augment her collection by retrieving a chick named Brutus from the mouth of a neighbor's dog named Bernie by forcing Bernie's jaws open. If Brutus as much as peeped -- which is unreasonable to expect as she was by then missing her entire head -- my daughter would have insisted we take her to the vet's, where we were already notorious for bringing in the only unpedigreed menagerie of pets for treatment. By the way, you should have seen how the manhandled dog ran away -- his tail between his legs -- crying "ralph, ralph, ralph," which happened to be the name of his owner. Poor Bernie, he never knew what hit him.

My office friend Arthur collected yellow green jokes, ostensibly to burnish his lackluster lectures on business planning and entrepreneurship. I asked him to quit it because he often forgot the punch lines anyway. He doggedly kept on collecting and mis-delivering them because that -- his forgetting the clinchers -- made his audience laugh, anyway. Art suddenly died a few years ago and my favorite image of him is still where he scratches his head and smiles sheepishly and boyishly, after botching yet another otherwise perfect little joke.

A former boss handed down to me his breathtaking (his adjective, not mine) stamp collection, which included first-issue stamps, Olympics stamps from 1950 backwards, Princess Diana stamps, stamps almost as big as a fourth sheet of paper, and stamps of unstamply shapes -- circles, ovals, triangles and hexagons. He expected me to wax ecstatic at the small turnover ceremonies we had just before he left for abroad. I managed to coo my feigned delight and I guess I did myself proud for he smiled in a very self-satisfied way. After the collection languished for years in my possession, I tried to pass it on to my eldest son who tried in turn to push it underhandedly to the brother next to him. In time, I gave the stamps away, a little at a time, to another friend who knew how to spell and pronounce "philately" correctly.

I am not so quirky I don't want to be a collector all because every other person I know is into collecting. On the contrary, I like the idea of being fixated on an object rather than a person. After all, we keep losing people when they migrate or die or stop loving us. And while they are still around, people complain we over- under- or mishandle them. Inanimate objects -- blessthem -- stay on and on (unless you break or misplace them and then it's all your fault) and are faultlessly self-sufficient, stoic, and uncomplaining.

My point before I got lost explaining the difference between animate and inanimate collections is that collectors cannot just choose what to collect: it is pre-ordained. When God matched collectors and collectibles, he was quite specific about it. Stamp people are not to be mixed up with coin people, candle people, perfume people, stationery people, rare books people. There are those into Lladro figurines and Murano crystals and those that do matches and caps. Apparently it was not written in the stars that I do stamps.

What was I then? I wanted to collect boy friends and suitors at the very outset but I simply did not have the shape and the looks required. So I reluctantly gave that up. I tried elephant figurines and paper currencies, then baskets, then Delft blues without much success. I was beginning to panic -- like a maiden about to enter spinsterhood -- I was sleeping when collector's instincts were being distributed. Until I went to Japan and saw in the sidewalks what looked like teapots with double spouts. Something clicked in me and I knew I had found the thing for which I was intended.



Since then my friends who are about to travel to Japan do so stealthily because they know if I knew they were Japan bound, I would drop my manners and be inconsiderate and insist they bring me stuff that had to be hand carried, being fragile-handle with care.

It IS preordained -- for why else would I have a cupboard groaning with tea pots now when I never ever got the tea set I made kulit to Santa for in my bereft childhood.

(By the way, I also collect -- aside from Japanese tea pots -- Chinese tea pots and generic -- from whichever country -- whiteware. Hmmm ... lapit na Pasko, di ba?)

Ngyok-ngyok-ngyok (dad at comedy barn)

My dear blog friends!

A pre-Christmas treat for you ...

Just click here.

(Alternatively, so you can avoid loading time, go to www.youtube.com, then under "search," type "dad at comedy barn.")

Don't forget to turn up the sound. And please don't choke while watching.

Still ngyok-ngyoking,

Annamanila


Note: Thanks to Juliet, the wittiest and prettiest helper at the internet scrabble club, for tipping me about this site.