Here's my version of the "8 Random Things About Me" meme. After 5 years of web logging, it's a wonder how I still have things I've never written about.
1. I generate a lot of earwax. It takes 3 cotton buds to get my tiny ears clean.
2. I used to cry -- as in "Flor de Luna" cry -- when I see beggars in the streets. As I have morphed in to this horribly jaded monster, now, I just hope they don't tuktuk my car too hard. Like I said, monster.
3. I have used the same Parker fountain pen since 1999. It was a gift from my husband on our anniversary and bears my name on the cap. I never leave the house without it. I go on major freak mode, if it goes missing.
4. I recycle. Non-biodegradable items go into large bins at the side of my house for periodic pick-up by our village's "environment brigade". I make P100 every three weeks from crap.
5. I have never bought a piece of silver/gold/platinum jewelry. The precious pieces I have are heirlooms from my mom, and gifts from family. I'll have two rings reset when my boys want to propose to my future daughters-in-law. The rest is Lisa's loot.
6. I don't speak to my children in Tagalog, thinking they could always pick that up from TV, school, TV, friends or TV. Two of my three children are now borderline-flunking Filipino. The yaya's in Diego's school call him "Sam Milby".
7. I don't like driving a car with automatic transmission. Whenever I travel to the US for work and end up renting an AT car, I feel like I'm in a bump car.
8. I teach my kids to call body parts by their real names. Diego calls the female organ, "virginia"; but that was not my fault. He messed that up.
If you want to play, just say I tagged you, 'kay?
[As a matter of practice, I don't play on-line tag; because have to tag people back and it feels like I'm giving people work. But if I didn't do this, an evil being from my past would've published on his site (or so he says) a picture of me with cobra hair, plastic earrings and pre-braces teeth. I caved in to blackmail. Note: I'm not sending traffic his way, just in case he gets hormonal and publishes my photo from 1984 anyway.]
I ran out of Johnson's baby cologne, my pambahay scent; so I ended up using my "going-out" parfum, Estee Lauder's Beautiful. It was 9pm. I had just taken a bath and was getting ready for bed.
As I was drying my hair, Lisa and Diego entered the room. Their faces immediately changed; and the two began whimpering softly, like muffled puppies.
"What's wrong?" I turned.
Diego pouted, his lips puffed up more than usual. "Where are you going?"
"Uh - to bed." I pointed to what I was wearing. "I'm in pajamas."
The 7-year old boy crossed his arms in front of him. The 3-year old girl, being the copycat that she is, did exactly the same thing. "But you smell like work."
My children are trying to make two points. One, I have to stop returning to the office for conference calls with the US, sneaking out in the middle of the night. Two, if I do not want to be suspected of intending to go back to work, I should not smell too good when I tuck them in.
Like I don't have enough to do in my life, I went ahead and started another project. The idea came to me this week-end while cleaning up this site of bad code. I read every entry from beginning to end, and was overwhelmed with a desire to develop the fiction pieces which had potential. Out of nowhere, I decided I was going to start making mini-movies and to publish them on the net.
The movie site, which will be an annex to this one, will be "home to my digital shorts. Stuff that I've compiled for family. Stuff I've written through the years that friends found entertaining. Stuff that I put together to indulge my left-of-center sense of humor." Visit Monavies. Basta lang.
As a little girl, I found many, many reasons to love extreme weather. Black-out's were a bummer; but I loved playing shadow animals with my little sister, cooped up in our chilly room in the middle of the night. Drippy roofs were a menace; but I got a kick out of launching paper boats where the roof drain pipe ended. I didn't have to go to school; but ... hang on, there is no 'but' to that. I loved typhoon weather because I didn't have to go to school!
So it felt strange to be awakened by whining children at 5:30am, even if we all knew classes had been suspended the night before. My eldest son wanted to go to school JUST IN CASE his teachers wanted to brave the rains to deliver quarterly exams to a bunch of 14-year-old's. My second son wanted to go to school because our family might be the only people who watched TV last night, and their Linggo ng Wika program is going to go on without him (he had been modelling his magsasaka outfit and hat all week). My youngest wanted to go to school, if her brothers were going.
My children were hovering over my snoring carcass at 5:30am, trying to convince me to take them to school on a Signal No 2 day! That's just wrong on so many levels.
As I tried to instill values that will make my children productive members of society, I think I might have accidentally sewn their butts too tight.
