Arctic Beetle

The past fourteen days ended quite too rapidly and I don’t know if I’m accounting them in such manner because I have mostly caught my Zs way ahead of my usual 1-2 am sleeping time or it’s just that when faced with an ill situation that leaves me agape and surprised as Dora and Boots when Swiper is, for crying out loud, finally in the range of their sight, everything seems to have been hit by VLC’s speed up option. To say that those two weeks was a roller coaster ride is yards away from the appropriate description I want achieve and not to mention, being inept in using metaphors and unfair to roller coasters that fancy me. Had I written a version of this post on every day of last week, this would have several variation in its concluding paragraph and the primary emotion it would want to suffuse. My fingers are crossed that what happened today is a definite ending to my potential Maalaala Mo Kaya entry.  What took place will be condensed as much as possible and narrated hereinafter.

So it is no longer a hypothesis and is a proven theorem that my sisters are luckless in the love department. Maybe not entirely but if they happen to be lucky, there is something in that luck that is also being unlucky. If you cannot pin the idea down, then how is “a guy whom you love so much, complete with the falling royal red hearts, revealing to you that he’s been divorced twice and has four spawns” to explain that? Guess what, I’m revealing you’s antecedent in the wrong sequence: my sister who’s desperate to get married. Flame me not ’cause how else would you describe someone who officially affirms that she and her suitor are together after two weeks of chasing and who forcefully wants the wedding on May, even getting to the point that she had us believe that it was the guy’s idea originally?

To sum up the incident from two weeks ago, with her narrow mindset that’s good enough to be considered close working at its best, she eloped.. not with Dagoberto but with her notion that until the time he steps on the Philippine shore, he would support her with his 150 dollars whose frequency at which they would come God knows what. Either she is too fed up with her self-deprecating thoughts or too brilliant to tell her friends that we beat her just to sway their sympathy and win the comfort of their homes. As narrated by my mother herself, she went forth with a smile and a hint of scorn on her face.

She wasn’t home for quite some time and so was my mother’s usual self after being upbraided by my sister for not gifting her a laptop, for entering her room when she doesn’t want her to, for scolding her back when she was still tameable and simply for being her mother — okay, I just made the last one up but all of them allude to that, don’t they? No wonder her eyes were turgid from all the crying. And to be honest, as much as I wanted to show my sister that my life does not overlap with hers, I did shed some tears too after witnessing our mother’s self-worth decrease like the coordinates of a half-life graph.

Last week, for the most part it, was persuading her to come back home, to my displeasure. Hours ago, she finally went back with traces of hunger on her shrinking belly and her bullheadedness still present. But that’s okay because there is nothing more comforting than seeing my mother’s relief upon getting the household semi-tidy before my father’s arrival on the 28th and heart-warming than the thought of gathering everyone’s physical presence (except my eldest sister’s) on the first day of 2010. Also, I am happy that I no longer have to pat my stomach and have it suffer small servings of food intended to be my breakfast, lunch and dinner because apparently, there is no more reason for my mother to trim down the production of quality food in quality amount.

Whether or not Noah’s Arc is a fact or a fiction and whether or not I am one of the organisms who deserve to be rescued and be given a chance to procreate in hope of producing a good lineage, the people who resided in Manila and the nearby provinces sure needed its sudden existence — as sudden as how the tropical storm Ondoy took around 300 lives and as how it rendered the urban a sea of mud and debris.

Who would have thought that the typhoon PAGASA said was relatively weak and would possibly not call forth any suspension of classes would be this catastrophic? How brilliant is that? It’s not as if they get any forecast correct in the first place, but if these estimates (I know this isn’t the best word to use since this is synonymous to an approximate guess, but for the lack of a better word, allow me to) will still irksomely persist, then might as well they change their acronym first to something discouraging and then quit as an official agency of the Philippine government.

Because of a two and a half hour-long Math long test involving Trigonometry which I more or less messed up, I was left stranded in the campus for almost twenty-four hours, along with other people who still couldn’t believe that time that going home is not among the things we must do, or at least, can do. I am not complaining. That is an odd thing to do, especially when you continually see footages of vehicles stranded (or being moved around by the tempestuous flood) on the main roads and of people getting displaced from the comfort of their own homes.

Though Jacque Bermejo has finally released her official statement, her or rather, her hacker’s Facebook status, is nonetheless partially true. We all sinners, yes, but if there are people who actually deserve what happened (provided they experienced it and not because they are overseas making the most out of their remaining term begging for dough), it would be those government officials who are apparently not coming down from their ivory seat of apathy and indifference. Not all, I know, but how I wish those who are running in the next election would let us have a wee look  at what we can expect from them eight months from now. Now that I think about it, eight months isn’t too long when you face it with optimism and the desire for change.

Well, who am I to talk? I admit that I still don’t know what to do with this school-free week right under my nose. Helping your fellow Filipinos is particularly hard when your parents belong to the part of the society who complain and clamor for change but are doing nothing to alleviate the situation. Maybe I should first start being an activist at home.

Props to GMA and ABS-CBN for the way they handled this calamity. For a moment, I forgot that their evening news have commercials in between, that their World News portion would rather feature a chicken with extra appendages than North Korea’s nuclear weapon and that their Showbiz News is needlessly hyped.

Age is just a number, I’m told. That’s true, I suppose, though that statement really underestimates the importance of numbers in civilization. Numbers are beautiful, horrible things, bursting with knowledge and meaning, holding in their cruel grasp the capacity for extreme reduction, and perhaps, the very secrets of the universe. Numbers, even when you attach the idea that they are “just” numbers, all tell stories, both wonderful and frightening.

And there’s everything and nothing, the thinking as pointless as it is unavoidable. We cannot see the future, and the past cannot be revisited. All we have, in the end, is a number, and whatever meaning we choose to give it.

-Phil Dy (2009)

True, further brooding on the matter is pointless, yet don’t you find it sardonic that as we age, that as we add one more year to our lifespan which we are to fete for, it becomes less and less anticipated and celebrated? The greetings have grown to be adequate and the parties abundant with food and guests turn obsolete.. which then makes me reckon that maybe after all, birthday celebrations are exclusively for children, as how using raincoats are solely for first to third graders (or the traffic enforcers and police patrols). But just like the raincoats’ case, we actually don’t know why we outgrew them, when in fact, everyone has the right and discretion to use these pragmatic rain bucklers, no matter how doltish you will appear like donning them.

Sigh, I will end this day with me both thankful and melancholic (with the latter dominating).

When the capillaries leading to my gluteus maximus become congested by waiting for an FX in a terminal which is purportedly abounding with it and whose barkers think they could get away by peppering chairs all over the place, it makes me want to smash every clock that reminds me of how long I have been waiting for the vehicle that got lost in time or 45 minutes, to be accurate.

When a bus driver or a driver of any vehicle for that matter honks his horn at me for crossing the pedestrian lane which to his eyes probably camouflages itself as part of the cement it is adding details to, it makes me want to stick my middle finger up at him, at the risk of seeming like a person who irksomely pelts her every sentence– no, phrase with profanities.

When a woman in front of me slumps onto my lap because a child almost steals her gold necklace from outside the jeepney, it makes me want to drag the child off with his ears and torture him to death while instilling upon his mind that he shouldn’t let out his financial frustration on other plebeians who are equally feeling it and that he could have just started young as an activist criticizing the superiors doing nothing to alleviate his situation.

When my travel time is further prolonged by cretins who make their imaginary third lane and who are colossally creative to imagine that there exist a series of white stripes everywhere along a highway, it makes me want to amputate their legs in a non-surgical manner and hand their upper body to the Happy Tree Friends who know of more ways to disfigure an organism.

When a jeepney driver suspects my integrity by doubting my request for a change, not to mention he puts my life twice to the brink of death by nearly producing an elastic collision between his jeepney and a tricycle with his rapid reverse and lead-taking, it makes me want to crush the thing between his legs with Thor’s hammer and feed his entrails to Cerberus.

When all of the things I mentioned above happen to me in just one day, they make me want to write about them.

A day after my sister left for Japan, the PC passed away. Whilst sarcasm should be sensed and should be figured out by the reader or the one you are talking to naturally, I’ll state it myself — with my sister around, it could have been fixed as fast as how a high-speed internet in Japan can download a whole season of an anime. Imagine, if that was the case,  my mom didn’t have to proceed to a PC repair shop and discover that in order to get XP installed back, she needs to pay 8000 php for something you can download from The Pirate Bay. Well, sure, it’s the manpower we are after but still. Had I not been called to take a bath, I would have seen how my sister downgraded the laptop’s OS to XP and would have been able to fix this trouble myself. And holy smokes, this whole inconvenience happened just days after I’ve expressed my aim to blog again. In the end, we rejected their offer. Who wouldn’t?

Coincidentally, that same day, I left the audio CD I was supposed to pass and it, being a very crucial component of my group’s grade in our elective, I was obliged to bucket along to the internet shop one of my groupmates was in, to download the songs, burn them to a CD and to find out that she hasn’t figured out how to print the CD leaflet I designed, with only fifteen minutes left before the next class. With a download speed of  3 kbps,  6 songs with sizes of approximately 5 MB in queue and about six people to compete against for the printer, I think Virgil would have to rise from his grave to write a sequel for Atlas’ narrative and note that Zeus condemned another person from the modern times to carry the Earth with him. And yes, I cut that class and did it for good.

Ere these blotches of misfortune, I saw my standings for two of my major subjects and of course, I wouldn’t be affixing this to the previous paragraphs and wouldn’t be writing about them like this if they were exceptional. Once again, reality proved that it can prick better than a spindle and that there is no such thing as a fairy tale.

And also, there was the concept paper I had to pass two days after (even with that PC-less situation at hand). Being the grade-conscious that I am, I went to a study center the next day and typed the concept paper which was supposedly a group chore; but since our breaks seemed to have a null set as their intersection, I wrote one anyway, just in case. When the direful day came, all that was left to do was print it; however, as soon as I saw the mail I sent to myse– damn, I forgot to attach it! I went back to the study center in hope of seeing the file still there. As luck would have it, it was and as faint makings of what you’d call group work, my other groupmates made a concept paper as well. To not break the rare streak of luck, our professor allowed every group to send the edited version on Saturday (yesterday).

Never was I branded as a freeloader and certainly, I couldn’t afford to have last week as an exception. I was a beggar and as they say, I can’t be a chooser; hence, I took every opportunity there was to get the PC back, even if it meant Vista would have to clog my system again. Honestly, the Vista I knew from my laptop and I expected to be installed on the PC was fine, but Vista Home Starter definitely isn’t with its three-program limit aboard. After getting rid of that concept paper in my To-Do list, recovering XP became imperative. Today was mostly spent trying to retrieve a CD containing all the drivers and utilities for the motherboard — only to learn that it is a CD I brushed off everytime I searched through the heaps of CD spindles.

After last week, I have grown certain that life, reality and death have two things in common, and that is, they have a weird sense of humor and they certainly grasp the concept of sarcasm. Glad I survived.