Digs : Mommy, when we build our new house, I want a 'manure'.
Me : A what?
Digs : A 'manure'.
Me : (I had no idea what my eight-year old son was talking about. But like everything else in life, I faked it.) You have a 'manure' every day. Little, round ones.
Life has a way of challenging my self-fabricated absolutes. "I have a high tolerance for pain," I bragged more than once. Then, Cookie, our adopted dog, bit me.
I pissed the dog off so much, he bit my arm, my torso and my rear. (Remember that scene from "There's Something About Mary", where Ben Stiller was walking around with a dog latched onto him? I looked like that, mid-bite.) He shook his head around as he bit me; so there were bruises, as well as bites. That was the easy part.
Then came the hospital. Not a friendly place to begin with; their emergency rooms, more so. I half-expected nurses to chide, "Dog bite? I just cleaned up a guy who got biten by a snake, after being run over by a bus, when he jumped off a thirty-story building, after downing a bottle of pesticide." I was determined not to act all weepy.
Then came the anti-tetanus and anti-rabies shots. I think the dose was based on my weight, which explains the three gallons of pancake-syrup-like liquid that had to be prepped in front of me. I counted 8 syringes. The muscular and the intra-dermal shot on each arm was tolerable. The five shots into the wound on my inner arm made me teary. The five shots into wound on my side made me remember waking up after a C-section. The five shots into the wound on my butt made me ... actually, I forget, as I may have passed out. I think I regained consciousness only when my perfectly unbiten butt cheek felt the pain of the left-overs being injected into it.
I drove to the hospital alone. With my muscles from my butt down to my legs weak as they were, I had to sit in my car for about thirty minutes, before I found the strength to drive outta there.
BTW, Cookie, aka Cookie Monster, is not rabid. Just grumpy.
While my four-year-old daughter looks freakishly like me ('See that image of me on the left side of this page? Lisa looks just like that.), proof that she carries Mel's DNA jumps out at me every so often.
LISA: Mommy, why is your tummy so big?
MONA: Well, when your Kuya Carl was was a very, very little baby, he lived in my tummy. It made my tummy stretch so he can move and play. When Kuya Digs was a little baby he lived in my tummy too. And when you were a little baby, you lived in my tummy too. My tummy is big because all of my babies grew inside and then came out of tummy. (The more logical Mommy-ate-too-many-pizzas-and-burgers version was not whimsical enough).
Life has taken me to four countries in six weeks. That's seven airports in two continents. Four time zones and two climates.
The trips have not been without their hiccups. Like when I rented a car in the US with GPS, entered the wrong hotel address and drove into the belly-button of the American midwest. I was 20 miles off course before I realized the oversight; and by then, all I could see was corn and truckers.
But no threat of missing my transfer, of facing power-tripping immigraton officer or of being crushed by my kabayans scrambling for their balikbayan boxes can compare to the scare I faced when I got home: getting caught between a hoard of sugar-fuelled children in Halloween costumes and a giant bag of candy. I swear I saw a rabid three-year old in butterfly wings.
The company I work for is one of the largest indutrial technology leaders in the world. You wouldn't recognize the brand, if you are a mall rat. But if you work in offshore drilling or hi-tech manufacturing or data network engineering, it will definitely ring a bell. We are a 20 billion dollar company that has a product and service portfolio so diverse, I have yet to fully understand its breadth, despite 15 months of attempting.
Yesterday, at a presentation for visiting American investment analysts where I was one of several presentors, I learned one of our divisions produced a product line critical to industrial process management. Gas analyzers.
Instead of keeping my mind on the presentations like a normal person, I found myself making a mental note of people I knew whose social lives would benefit from having their gas analyzed:
- Code Green Alert. Typically from cabbage, hard-boiled eggs. Unstable. Mitigate by looking around and blaming the guy next to you.
- Code Yellow Alert. Typically from tacos, beer. Serious. Mitigate by avoiding open windows and electric fans. Stay downwind.
- Code Red Alert. Typically from kamote, curry. Critical. Stay away from open flame and hope for the best.
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