June is such a drag

June is such a drag.

Iloilo became a raging sea. My cousin's family had to be rescued from their rooftop! They had a second floor but the water reached the second floor. They had to sail to safety on board an upturned table, dragging themselves away via rope.

My friend's family had to hightail it to their second floor, and their house has never been flooded before. Now they are cleaning it out but how to clean with no running water, a muddy well, no electricity. Who wants to clean when it's all mud anyway, all your furniture pickled in slime, no dry mattresses, nothing to sleep on, no food in the probably dead refrigerator, nothing cooking in the probably dead stove. And the dear oldies are stressed, stressed, stressed, no such thing as the comfort that was home. So trying to pick up the pieces. Now they need to buy again almost every piece of furniture/ appliance they ever had. Multiply this same story several hundred times.

My other friend's brother-in-law had to swim through 2-3 kilometers of highway to find food for his family, so submerged and swampy was their subdivision.

My friend's friend's family also upped and moved to their second floor. Their dad went down to get some clothes, they wondered what took him so long. And the next thing was he was floating in the water.

It took two days for rescuers to get near a boat that capsized. Two days! Can you imagine being tossed in a stormy sea for half an hour? Let alone two days? For those two days, mostly everyone knew about the upturned ship through the tv and the radio but the weather was bad, and perhaps, the inertia was the same. How hopeless. It took more than two days for the shipping line to make any statement to the growing mob of relatives keeping vigil by all their offices.

It took the electric company fifteen hours to respond to our calls for assistance as our electric post sparked and left our five houses in a row without electricity last night.

This is the problem when my assumption is that life should be a bed of roses.

inconsequential biggies

1. MY CURRENT FAVORITE FOOD are saba (oh yes, go boiled bananas! hehehe), spaghetti (this is a newbie, as in I crave spaghetti with red sauce), yogurt shake, wheat bread, rice! Yes! Go carbs! Hahahaha. Nah, I just have a newfound appreciation and respect for rice after being not into it for a bit. Most things are good in moderation, and especially good after deprivation. Hihihi.

2. MY NEW HAPPY SECRET THING (unless you read this blog, or you're my friend who shouted my name from a tricycle last week) is long walks around the village on late afternoons. Very happy. Very nice before the June solstice. It gets dark so late. Very calm it makes me feel, air pollution, street crime and all. Hehe.

3. MY NEW NOTHAPPY SECRET THING (unless you read this blog) is crying myself to sleep at night for things that come to mean the most (emotionally) in the dark in bed.

4. MY OTHER SECRET THING is dancing to Persephone when I'm alone, dancing like Ellen Degeneres, hehehe.

5. MY CURRENT/LONGTERM ADDICTION is scrabulous and scramble on facebook. So fun!

6. MY BEST MOMENT IN THE LAST 7 DAYS was a counseling "moment" with this girl. Yes!

7. I AM LOOKING FORWARD TO becoming the "secret woman" I catch glimpses of now and then as the hours blur into days and the days into weeks. The one who's responsible for herself, in all senses of the wor(l)d.

post #1,001

i feel surprisingly genuinely light-hearted today.

which is a surprise.

which feels genuine.

just think. if you find me kinda trying, just imagine how i must feel!

i have no choice but to live with myself!

so, contrary to the sound advice of ms. caroline myss (and if there's one thing you need to do in your life, it is to read her),

i have thought of several things that could have contributed to my feeling well:

i have finally found the perfect spot for my electric fan.
i have finally perfected the art of mood lighting for my bedroom.
i feel physically lighter than i have in months (probably due to blood loss)

wala lang. ms. myss wins.

you want to go out sometime? :P

imagine my chagrin when i suddenly realized that i had failed to cover the topic of "panliligaw" in the last gender-sensitivity training for young women (among many other things i failed to cover :P but this one finding glared at me from the post-training diagnostic sheets).

well, you know, that women can, if they want to. or more to the point, as my mentor sis explained, females need not sit cooling their heels for males to make the first move. it would be perfectly all right for women to express their feelings to men, on their own initiative/ volition. doing so does not take away from their worth as persons (the usual putdown: "cheap"), even adding to it as they are able to be confidently themselves.

i was so distressed by my omission that my sister documentor took it upon herself (also after my desperate suggestion, but actually doing so to my great amusement)to stage-whisper to each of our workshop participants, "puwede ka manligaw!" as each one came up on stage to receive our congratulatory kisses and a diploma for completing the 3-day training.

however, notwithstanding my strong convictions on this matter, i am actually a card-carrying member of the skittish clan of lurkers-secret-stalkers-and-across-the-room-gazers. i stack my hopes and romantic desires in my heart and stare longingly across the room/the road/ the seas/ the continents/the world, hoping against hope. i was born silly, that way!

i quake in my wedges thinking of coming in from the cold. you know when you're in crush with someone you don't know and who doesn't know you? how do you parachute yourself into someone's life and come up charming? the princess charming come to get to know the knight in no distress?

wala lang. just imagining myself asking someone for coffee and dying. i kid you not.

carrie's dream closet

hey :)

saw sex and the city movie with hb last night, and it was a lovely little film, not the least because we're fans. have always followed the lives of those four women because, notwithstanding the sexualization (or glamorizing of sex), the romanticisation of so-called women's "choices", and the crass commercialism/materialism (that super ugly LV bag, hello?!?), there's still so much there that women like us (not in our early twenties, have undergone many ups and downs in our love lives) can relate to like the very real love/ friendship, the characters' endearing humanity, and their hopes and dreams. (completely forgetting for the moment, that hb and i have had much imagined/real fixation with New York City, hehehe, her for their scholarship year there, and me for a previous love interest. oh, and the shoes :P). oh, and in the end, they all ended up with really lovely men (including the villainous Mr. Big). see, loads of reasons.

and, it got me to thinking (on a new track, seeing as i do too much thinking already, anyway). and i thought that in some ways, some of life's more complicated problems are really quite simple. so simple that we can miss them for years. much like i can read the long words from the twisted -- up, down, diagonal, and across -- letters in a game of scramble/boggle, but often miss the words made up by directly aligned letters.

like the fact that, you can probably can actually tell (:p) which men in your life really do love you. they are the ones who actually care about how you feel. so simple but it's become so complicated. notwithstanding the roles out there that are so easy for us to play, that culture has so helpfully laid out all ready for us to assume (like the maligned suffering woman, the insensitive adulterous man, the ultra caring nurturing woman, the charming abusive dick), hence making it extra difficult to find and be our true authentic selves, the truth is that we are worth loving (despite ourselves, and despite the men who don't), and there are men out there who truly care (despite the men who don't, and despite them being themselves). but it gets so convoluted and we women will fail to weed out the ones who don't care (which we could have probably clearly seen after a few attempts), and then we die trying to make them care (a bit like rushing into rocks repeatedly). it's not helped that many times, those who don't give a rat's ass, really, will also make it appear like they do, occasionally. or that by this time, we'd have made ourselves care for them genuinely, that they themselves will find it impossible to let go of being loved up so nicely by us. we provide them endless, as one of my old fashioned psych books call it, "narcissistic supplies".