This morning the doorbell rang. It was Julien, tired and unshaven, but it was my Julien! I didn’t even know he had caught a flight back home. Miraculously, the sun is out as well and the temperatures have risen. It feels like summer again.
So I leave you with my favourite song from the newest Arcade Fire album:
Ah, the rewards after 2 months of torture!
Currently listening to:
Arcade Fire
The Suburbs
Julien is sick with a stomach bug, fever and chills. He’s currently wrapped up in our thickest comforter and moaning the loss of his long-awaited weekend. Lila is teething. At least, we suspect she is teething (We want to look at her gums, but each time we open her mouth she sticks out her tongue). She drools all over the place, she babbles nonstop, she chews at her fists with a vengeance.
The weekends are supposed to be my days-off, but given the circumstances and the rainy weather outside, it seems that I have to put off my several-hours-of-feeling-like-my-old-self till next weekend. So here I am in the kitchen, with Conan O’Brien’s last ever episode of the Tonight Show playing in the background (I love you Conan. And I hate you Jay Leno), eating leftover cake from last Thursday. Damn. I’m so worried when the people I love are sick or uncomfortable. I wish I could make things better.
Currently listening to:
Akron/Family
Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free
Fucking hell, talk about itchy fingers! Four months after my attempt to give myself a haircut (and failing miserably: my hair is still uneven by 2 inches on one side), here I am again, fighting the urge to chop my hair off. I was mumbling my desire to give myself another haircut an hour ago, then started looking for pictures online to inspire me. Afterwards, predictably, the idea started to seem more and more brilliant that I dug out my thinning scissors (yes! I found them!) and started to measure how short I wanted my hair to be.
At the first strains of expressing my desire to “even out” my hair, Julien exhibited A) Suspicion, B) Skepticism, C) Forced Nonchalance and D) Panic. Just as I was about to make the first snip, he lunged at me, hustled me to the guest room, shook me by the shoulders and cried out, quite seriously and almost hysterically: “You think you can do these things, but you can’t, Nemo!”
Currently listening to:
Medeski, Martin and Wood
Out Louder
I have the ability to remember my dreams in detail and to dream in colour. Dreaming in colour is not an ability, I suppose, but it is to Julien, who seldom remembers his dreams.
Last night, I dreamt that there was this guy who was in love with this rich girl, and this rich girl’s maid also had a crush on the guy, so during a party the maid was wearing a blue flimsy corset that showed off her boobies (my dream took place in the 16th century, I think). Of course, the guy asked the rich girl to dance, which set the maid off. Suddenly the dream shifted to a bedroom where the maid pretended she was the rich girl and the guy, for some reason, didn’t see that she was the maid so they proceeded to lie down on the bed.
That’s where my dream ended, because at that precise moment, someone lunged for my foot and bit my toe.
The toe-biting incident occured at 5:20 am, and the culprit, as you may have already guessed, was Julien. He had just come out of the shower and saw my foot poking out of the comforter. My foot, he said in his defense, was moving. Which is why he thought I was awake. Which is why he decided to jump onto the bed, still a bit damp from his shower, burrow himself under the comforter, grab my foot and bite it (a playful bite, of course, as he would never really bite me)
“I was sleeping!” I howled once I’d recovered from shock. “You woke me up, you dink! I had a dream and I wanted to finish it!”
“But… your foot, it was moving, like this.” He went under the comforter and started moving his foot to re-enact the scene that led to toe-biting. “I’m really sorry… were you really asleep?”
When he left for work I couldn’t fall asleep anymore, and as we send emails to each other during the day I wrote him a few hours later and added as an afterthought:
PS. I couldn’t sleep last night. Then, this morning someone lunged for my foot and bit it.
to which he replied:
BTW: if someone bites your toe in the morning, it means that he likes you.
Sometimes he reminds me of Calvin, and sometimes, like this morning, he reminds me of Hobbes.
Currently listening to:
Joseph Arthur & The Lonely Astronauts
Let’s Just Be
Filipino humor is a special sort of gem. It’s a gem that stays dusty, flawed and chipped – but it’s still a gem, to people who can appreciate it.
A shining example is the Filipino term usapang lasing (literally, drunken talk) which gives birth to crude, mind-boggling jokes that make sense only to the heavily intoxicated. Usapang lasing sessions are mostly held over bottles of Red Horse, late in the evening, between a cluster of friends and pulutan.
We may also be familiar with the term kwentong barbero (literally, barber stories), which gives me the impression that barbers in the Philippines, those who aren’t gay, are simply dead-bored with their jobs that they spin bogus, out-of-this-world stories to their unwilling barbershop victims to pass the time – making the customers wonder if the barber is indeed a mentally-ill patient who has managed to escape his cell. Hence, the term kwentong barbero.
***
Back in college there was a yearly tradition of Streetpainting, where students were allowed to paint the street (duh) in front of the AS building. Being Fine Arts students, this was something to look forward to, mostly because the walls of the Fine Arts building were already covered with so much graffiti that there was hardly any more space to even write down one’s name. This was also an excellent opportunity to not go home, to hang out with friends, to vandalize the “conyo street”, and to maybe eat tapsilog at Rodic’s as soon as it opened for the day, given that we had enough money for breakfast.
While waiting for the paint to dry, the usapang lasing started. “Do you want to buy eyedrops?” someone asked, lazily. “For only one peso.” He paused, then delivered the punchline we all knew. “Pero may problema, mehn… roll-on!” (”there’s a problem though, it comes in a roll-on bottle”)
Between groans and jeers of “We already know that one!” and “Get a life!”and “Ang baduy mo, ha” and “Tangina mo” someone followed it up. “What about a helicopter, do you want to buy a helicopter?”
“How much?” chimed in one student, the beer obviously getting to her.
“Ten pesos!”
“Only ten pesos?” someone asked encouragingly, from the other side of the street.
“Oo! Pero may problema, yung katawan yung umiikot, hindi yung elisi!” (”It’s the body that turns, not the propellers”)
An hour later, everyone was rolling over in laughter, either stoned, drunk or sober, rolling over the paint, rolling over the grass, rolling around everywhere. (”Gusto mo ng kotse? Kaya lang yung windshield, may grado!” “Gusto mo ng stockings? Kaya lang baggy!” “Gusto mo ng trabaho? Taga-hila ka ng elevator!” “Gusto mo ng lion? Kaya lang yung buhok niya, one-length!”) The laughter had reached maniacal proportions. The jokes weren’t even funny anymore, we were just letting the mood and alcohol and the moon take over what came out of our mouths and were finding it, well, hilarious. Students from other colleges looked at us like we were mad. “It figures,” they probably sniffed self-righteously, “they’re from Fine Arts, and they think they’re cool.” Of course we weren’t cool – we were just pathetically happy.
***
Conan O’Brien’s humor is probably the closest the West has ever gotten to Filipino humor. His humor is condescending, crude, and very self-depricating. Any Filipino would appreciate him.
***
I have to admit, it was hard getting Julien to “get” my jokes during the first few months of marriage.
“Hey, do you want to buy a rocking chair?” I said to him one day.
“From whom?” he asked.
“It doesn’t matter. It only costs 2 euros.”
He turned to look at me. I started to giggle, because I’m a very bad joke-teller: I always start laughing at my own jokes before delivering the punchline. “But there’s a problem,” I said between guffaws. “It comes with a grandmother!” (May kasamang lola, in Filipino – which is funnier I think). I ended up laughing by myself. It was one of those uncomfortable moments when you hear your laughter hang in the air.
“Don’t you get it? You don’t think it’s funny? Ok… do you want to buy eyedrops?”
“This is n’importe quoi,” he shot me down.
And this is how my “Do you want to buy…but there’s a problem” series of jokes died.
***
I gave it another try a few days later. “Listen,” I told him, opting for a kwentong barbero now. “There are two men, coming home from a drinking session. They’re really drunk, and one of them sees dogshit on the road. Look man, one says, it’s chocolate. The other says, No it isn’t, it’s shit. They argue about it until they agree to taste it. The man who tasted it says, You were right, it’s shit. Good thing I didn’t step on it.” I burst out laughing.
“This is not very funny,” said Julien.
This frustrated me to no end. “Why don’t you tell me a joke then?”
He said, “Ok, I read one the other day. A priest, a doctor and an engineer were at the golf course, waiting for their turn because there was a slow group of golfers playing at the moment. So they ask one of the staff why these golfers were so slow. Oh, they are a group of blind firefighters, we let them play here for free because they lost their sight after trying to save our clubhouse from a fire. So the priest says, This is sad. I will pray for them tonight. And the doctor says, I will contact my opthalmologist to see if there’s anything he can do for them. And the engineer says, Why don’t they play at night?” At that, he looked at me triumphantly, and chuckled.
“This is not a joke, this is too intellectual!” I hollered (although I did get it, and found it funny, but in a Reader’s Digest’s Laughter is the Best Medicine sort of way).
“At least, it does not involve human trafficking.” Obviously, the thought of selling a grandmother along with a rocking chair still bothered him. “It is because engineers think this way, which is the funny part,” said my husband, the engineer.
Four years later, a healthy dose of exposure to my brothers and friends who are champions of kwentong barbero, numerous trips to the Philippines and a growing knowledge of Tagalog, Julien now manages to “get” Filipino jokes, occasionally rolling his eyes over punchlines, and seeing the beauty of n’importe quoi which Filipinos love so much.
I mean, for a country whose President is a joke, why not laugh?
*n’importe quoi = kalokohan
Links:
Currently listening to:
The Editors
An End Has A Start
Our first Christmas together as a married couple, I got Jul a straight razor. I don’t know why; it is certainly not romantic, but I remember him telling me that he thought straight razors looked really cool, especially in those Westerns, so I got him one. I remember running all over Lyon trying to find a shop that actually sold one: apparently you can only get them in these snotty leather/blade shops (and believe me, it isn’t the cheapest thing in the world), but it is a Beautiful Object nevertheless (the shop also sold a samurai sword, but samurai swords are reserved for the 10 or 15 year anniversaries. I think. That’s a special ninja blade.)
When he opened the box, he ooohed and ahhhed in delight at having received something utterly cool (I, too, oohed and ahhed – he had gotten me a Wacom pad).
I think it was a Sunday, a few weeks later, when he emerged from the bathroom, his face full of cuts and scrapes and random drops of blood. “Look!” he said proudly, “I used the shaving blade!”
“My God, are you all right?” I put my book down and rushed to his side.
“Yeah,” he said, gingerly rubbing a clear part of his face. “It’s just hard to use that thing, you know, especially if you aren’t used to it.” He paused, deep in thought. “The barber in Jordan made it look so easy.”
“The barber in Jordan wasn’t lacerating his own face, that’s why it looked easy,” I told him.
“But I’ll get used to it,” he told me. “As soon as I find the technique.”
Three years later, I was cleaning out the bathroom cabinet and found the razor.
“Hey!” I poked my head around the door of the living room. “Do you still use this razor, at least?”
“From time to time,” he replied, a little too quickly.
“Hmmm,” I said. “I’ve never really seen you use it.”
There was a long pause, then he said, “I’m scared to use it.”
We rip another page off the calendar. I look forward to things, but I look backwards as well and get a sinking feeling in my chest. Sometimes I feel that my heart is dropping, which makes it harder to walk because it falls to my feet, weighing me down, so I have to shuffle around the city, and people in trains or buses or on the streets look at me in pity and think, “Look at her.” Look at me. If they knew my heart was falling at the rate it was falling, they would have hugged me.
I suspect my heart falls because I keep on looking back, keep on evaluating myself. I am not happy with myself, because I have not achieved the things I said I would achieve. These thoughts keep me up at night, more often these days, maybe because I am alone. At nights I look up at the ceiling and feel it descending, or else feel my bed start to grow towards the ceiling until it becomes too claustrauphobic, leaving me to hug my knees to my chest because I’ve filled up the room, like a Magritte painting; a huge apple trapped in a room.
I panic when I think about the years I have not worked, the number of times I’ve been rejected, the feeling of falling short of my own expectations. It makes me doubt myself and my abilities: am I not good enough, am I doing something wrong, am I not good enough, am I doing something wrong… over and over until it exhausts me and I fall asleep, panicking even in dreams. “Look at her,” say the passers-by in my dreams. Look at me, I think, staring at my hands, or out the window, or at anything that is taking place in my dream. Look at her.
Before he left, I think it was before going to the airport, or even a few days before that, he told me, “You have to be patient. You have to act like an adult.” And I try. But I don’t think any of us really know what it is to be an adult (well, I certainly don’t). I think the only definition of being an adult is being able to get through the day. Because there are a million people out there who wake up with either anticipation or dread, and eat a breakfast they either have the appetite for or not, and go to a job they either love or hate, and by the time they are home, exhausted, still manage to eat dinner, or walk the dog, or get into an argument, make passionate love, or soak in the bath. Or maybe to be an adult is to bury your face into your loved one’s neck, wrapped in an embrace, hearing that person say “Whatever it is that is bothering you, you can escape to this,” and actually escaping.
Last Sunday we went rollerblading, as always. It was warm but there was a bit of wind, and the path was virtually empty throughout the whole trip.
We parked at Toulon. We started slowly, pacing ourselves, chatting from time to time. Until the pain started, which, I know now, if you leave it for a few minutes, becomes numb again until you forget it was ever there. We paused after the first leg of the cycling path, stretching our legs. The sun burned marks of the straps of my shirt on my shoulders. He passed me the energy drink we had bought earlier at the gas station: a purely psychological drink. The sun started to get to us. I was panting like a fish œout of the water.
“You need a push? I can push you,” he asked. I shook my head. “No, I’ll try to find my pace, you find yours,” I said. We took turns taking the lead. We passed the second part of the path. “Uh-oh. Here’s the dreaded part,” he shouted. We slowly made our way uphill. It’s an uphill where you can only push as hard as you can, and feel like you’ve barely moved. We inched our way to the top. We knew it was a downhill afterwards.
Cruising downhill, we spread out our arms for a bit of air, ecstatic that the first hard part was over. Energized, we started talking again, skating side by side, holding hands sometimes.
“Do we go a bit farther than we usually go?” I asked. “No, let’s just do what we can do, no pressure,” he said. We stopped a lot during the third leg of the path, there were plenty of streets to cross.
The next path, I feel the need to describe it, is the most serene path of all: there are mountains all around, you pass by fields, there is a stretch of land that grows flowers, up the road there are donkeys. We moved to our own rhythm, lost in thought. My feet ached but then they’re supposed to ache. Afterwards I realised that he had pulled ahead, in a burst of adrenalin, and I couldn’t see him anymore. I made my way to our meeting place, the bus stop, and waited for him, dizzy under the heat of the sun. A few minutes later he joined me, apologizing for going too fast. I told him that it was ok, that I couldn’t catch up, that’s all, and that we should head back.
Every weekend, as often as we can, we skate about 25 kms. We enjoy the thrill of outdoing each other; we want to be the one to jeer at the other for being tired, for giving up. It’s all a game of bravado, a game that only people who like competition can enjoy. But this weekend something was different. We had gone too far, it was too warm, we were hungry, we were tired, and it was a long way back to Toulon. A few minutes into the return trip, I paused. “Christ,” I muttered, massaging my aching calves, “it’s too far.”
He stopped as well, panting hard, not saying anything at first until he finally admitted, “Yes, it seems really far to get back…”
“It’s going to take forever,” I moaned. Then: “Can I have the energy drink?” We brightened up as we drank our psychological drink. He said gently, “Let’s go, when you think about it, we’re almost there. There are a lot of downhills, starting here.”
Three-fourths into the journey the mood changed. “We’re almost there!” he cheered, from some dam of energy that had broken somewhere. “Stay close!” he shouted, then started moving faster. I tried to keep up, until I got my pace again, then it was sort of a race to the finish line, where we finally relaxed and started chatting again. We staggered back to the car, removed our blades, wobbled about comically and painfully on our feet, then drove off.
We ate a late lunch at 4 pm by the port of Hyères. We wolfed down our crepes like there was no tomorrow. Boats docked and others headed off towards open sea; people milled about, dogs were walked by their owners, children ate ice cream.
Rollerblading is a remarkable sport. There is so much time to think; too many things you remember, too many things you forget. Things are easier once you know the path, but still your legs ache, and still you get dizzy, and still you feel like giving up, even though you’ve been through it more than a dozen times already. Between fighting your way through the torturous uphills, and letting yourself go at the downhills, I try to keep the following things in mind: Go at your own pace. Find your rhythm. Take turns in taking the lead. Don’t always try to stick together. But stay close to each other. Don’t be scared to say you think you’re tired, because maybe the other is thinking the same thing… and the only thing needed to be able to make it to the end, together, is to admit it. And always have a psychological drink to keep you going, even if you think it is only overpriced water and lemon.
And this is how we spent our third year anniversary of being married.
This morning, during the minutes/hours of lazing in bed after waking up on a Sunday morning, Julien awoke with another long-term project in his head, and spent 30 minutes describing every single detail of the said project.
“It’s going to be a success!” he said breathlessly, smiling at the ceiling.
“I doubt that it will… spark… (yawn) any interest,” I said doubtfully, rubbing my foot against his leg. “I mean, your target audience is pretty small.”
“It’s going to be a hit,” he said confidently, playing deaf. He turned over and we looked at each other over our pillows. He was grinning wildly. Over the next few minutes he attempted to tickle me, and stopped when he got bored from all my kicking and screaming.
“Well… ok. If you pull it off. Anyway, it’s worth a try… what should I do?”
“You can make the drawings. I’ll need a lot of studies. Character studies. You know anything about it?”
“Not a thing!” I told him. The wind almost blew our window shut, but thankfully the latch didn’t give way.
He had that crazed look on his face, the one that translated to “I will be hyperactive for the rest of the day.”
We then made out for a few minutes, and after we pulled away he murmured, “Now, all I need is someone to invest 2 million euros… and I’ll need about a hundred people…” He then wandered off to the kitchen to make cappucino.
If I were to recount to all of you out there… yes, all 5 of you… how I planned my wedding, wedding coordinators all over the world would send me an email, asking for an interview, and a full page of their brochure would be dedicated to me. They’d use me as their “How Not To Plan A Wedding” example. I would be a household name for all brides-to-be. (Brides Mother: “What do you mean you still haven’t contacted the caterer?” Bride-To-Be (whining): “But I’ve got too much to do! It can wait.” Bride’s Mother: “Do you remember the story of… KALA???!!!” Bride (shuddering, collapsing in tears) “Ok! OKAY! I’ll do it! Hand me the phone! And stop mentioning that name… I don’t want you jinxing my wedding!”)
I’ve become more responsible now, though. When I go to go the grocery store, I linger by the vegetable section and actually end up buying one or two of the critters (it’s called “Balanced Diet”). When out in pubs, I make it a point to order Vodka Orange from time to time… you know, for Vitamin C. And I can now staple fix my curtains to its proper length using a needle and thread something really sharp. My mother would hardly recognise me. My, what a woman I’ve turned out to be!
But before… whew! I was a wreck. Now, I’m not going to disclose the full details of how exactly the wedding of the century was planned because I want people to respect me, dammit.
But the past has come back to haunt me. Today I was looking for a document on my computer and came across my wedding party invitation photo. My mother, frustrated that I hadn’t arranged any family get-together after the ceremony, went ahead and booked a restaurant for family members only (Thanks Mommy!), probably to avoid being the gossip of all future family gatherings.
What Julien and I managed to book, though, was a party for our friends. We had envisioned everything: free flowing beer, oily chicken wings, great music, the works.
I, however, had failed to envision getting the word out to our friends. I was at work a few days before the wedding, taking a smoke break, when my officemate asked me if we were going to throw a wedding party, Julien and I. I assured her that of course I was going to “send out invitations”. Then I excused myself, ran back to my desk, opened my email account, cc’d everyone on my address book, and typed out the address of the bar, the time, the date, etcetera. After writing the email I thought it would be nice to attach a photo of the couple, to personalize it a bit. But I had only one photo of Julien and myself on my computer. After biting my lip and debating with the devil on my left shoulder and the angel on my right, I thought “Fuck it, I’m not spending too much time on this, it’s boring”, attached the photo and hit Send.
So, in short, our wedding party invitation was sent via email, along with this photo:
But hey – the chicken wings were really good!
