The power of goodbye

Today, as I say good-bye to the month of March, I am also bidding farewell to a few things in my life. This has been brewing for a few months now–this wave of change that has been lapping at the shores of my life. I tried to ignore and postpone the inevitable but I guess, like water, the changes that I am going through cannot be stopped completely. I can only build dikes and canals that will re-direct them or build a dam to try and stem its flow. But they will happen. Like water, change can not be stopped. I used to be so excited with changes. Now, a bit of that excitement remains, but it is also accompanied by terror. 

It could be because some of these changes are more welcome than others.

I am saying goodbye to a few elements in my lifestyle. When I got sick for two weeks at the start of March, it was a real wake up call for me. After all, I didn’t get gallstones by being passive. It was because of the way I ate. And when I got my temporary diagnosis (because I tested ‘weakly positive’ only–requiring another test in 3 months to confirm or refute this result) on hepatitis, I decided that I couldn’t really ignore the signals being made by my body and be healthier than I really am.

Since getting sick, I hadn’t drunk any alcoholic drink (now I have 2 idle bottles of vodka on my cupboard), eaten any pork and beef, and fastfood products (and KFC just opened its first store in Phnom Penh). I eat only fish, skinless chicken, and vegetables. When I cook (fry or sautee) I only use 1-2 tablesspoons of canola or olive oil. I eat small, frequent meals. I try to sleep and rise early. Since getting sick I had lost about 10 kilos. I can imagine how much I’d lose if I went and did some exercise. That’s next in my agenda.
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Mama

This is the second year that I am away from my mother when she celebrates her birthday. The last time I was in Manila was in December 2006. I went home on December 15. Kimrun followed on the 28th. Together we went back to Phnom Penh one week into the new year. I planned to go home in August to spend my birthday in Manila last year but work commitments prevented me from doing so.

From then it became somewhat easier to keep postponing the trip back home and before I knew it, it’s been 15 months since I’d been home. This is the longest time that I’d been away from my family. And I am not in the least bit home sick. I mean, like it or not, Cambodia has been home to me since 2004.

I was supposed to go home last March 25. I had booked my plane ticket, but cancelled it when an important project, which I had earlier given up on, suddenly materialized. Also, I have an impending trip to Johannesburg, if I get my visa on time. Hope I don’t end up like Amy Winehouse before the Grammys. The process of securing a South African visa deserves its own post so I’ll write about that later. So now that my work schedule is full until the end of June, I have forsaken all plans of going home.

When I said that I am not in the least bit homesick, I mean it. I miss a lot of people in the Philippines: family, friends, and everything in between. But do I miss my life in the Philippines? I’m gonna have to say no.

I miss being with my mother on her birthday, this is for sure. In fact, I thought about her a lot when I was sick earlier this month. But I didn’t want to go home to her because I was sick. I didn’t want to be a burden. Though I’m perfectly sure she won’t mind having me around, sick or not.

And now, like last year, I have no gift for my mother on her birthday. Just that 20-minute conversation we had yesterday and the few text messages we exchanged today. And a not-so-good poem for her in my other blog. But I noticed that as both of use grew older, she seems to be making less and less demands from me as I find myself increasingly wanting her to do so. The ironies of getting old.

On her birthday last year I wrote that my mother and I survived many things, including perhaps, each other. Reading that statement again now, made me rethink it. If my mother and I survived each other, we wouldn’t have been able to do it if we didn’t have each other in the first place. 

Love, truth, and honesty

I started writing this post yesterday. I was able to write a few paragraphs then decided to save it as draft, for continuation at a later time. As the few readers of this blog know, my posts are notoriously long and sometimes do not follow a set, logical flow. And when I sat back down to continue writing this post, I realized that I couldn’t add anything to the few paragraphs that I had managed to write.

So I deleted everything and decided to start anew.

My original intention in the post was to write about the three things in the title (from a hit song by Bananarama in the late 80s). The last thing I wanted was for the post to turn into another rant-piece about people (former friends or lovers) who have wronged me through either their emotional ineptitude or their stunted sense of ethics. I think I have done quite enough of that. It’s becoming too easy to write, frankly speaking.

A refrigerator magnet in a friend’s house reads: ‘I bitch, therefore I am.’

I don’t remember the first time I ever told a lie. All I know is that I was a very young boy when I did it. Looking back, the lies that I told back then were, for the most part, products of my wild imagination. I imagined myself to be much better than I actually were (to a certain extent, I think I still do). Many times, the lines between my imagined and real self would get blurred and I would end up saying things to people that were either exasperating or were simply untrue.

The fact that I was never penalized for these pronouncements somehow validated my thoughts and deeds. I think my mother basked in the fact that I was an imaginative child because she believed it connoted creativity and consequently, a higher level of intelligence.

But something else happened. My active imagination was largely tolerated and, to a degree, even nurtured. And all these imaginings (and daydreaming), I think, made me lazy. To lazy to live in the real world, so to speak. This laziness did not come in the form of not going to school or not doing school work–a schoolage child’s tasks. In fact, I did quite well in school. The laziness I’m referring to came in the form of ennui, and more frequently, complacency.

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Thank you

As the subject says, I’d like to thank Empress Maruja for nominating me for the Pinoy Blog Superstar February. It’s my second nomination, and I am very happy and honored to receive it. Winning would be great but I think the nomination is immensely pleasing already.

Good luck to all the nominees! 

Let it be

Good Friday this year finds me working. I am not complaining. When you’re living in a non-Christian country, religious holidays like these are not really felt, except perhaps, by the really religious, which I am clearly not.

Nevertheless, Good Friday this year finds me reminiscing on how I spent the Holy Week in the Philippines. Growing up in Baliuag, Bulacan, two highlights in the Holy Week were the Palm Sunday mass and the procession on Holy Wednesday. The Palm Sunday mass, commemorating Jesus’ triumphant return to Jerusalem, is celebrated with young palm fronds folded and fashioned into decorative pennants that are gaily waved in one part of the mass. These fronds are then hung on a wall outside the house as protection from evil all year, until it is replaced with a fresh frond at next year’s Palm Sunday.

I’m not sure if the procession on Holy Wednesday is done in other parts of the Philippines but it was a regular event in my old hometown. Floats or carozas depicting scenes from the life of Jesus, from annunciation to resurrection, parade in this procession. Each float contains life-size statues dressed and decorated according to the scene they were depicting. Affluent families own at least one caroza. No family in Baliuag can claim prominence (be it old or new) without a caroza in the Holy Wednesday procession.

This realization came to me later, but as a boy I delighted in watching this visual treat before my eyes. Some of the caroza, aside from being splendidly costumed and decorated, also came with other effects to heighten the scene. For example, the caroza depicting the crucifixion had lights that flashed like lightning and the sound of thunder. The evening heightened this particular effect very well.

By the morning of Maundy Thursday, my parents and I are off to my paternal grandparents’ home in Candaba, Pampanga to spend the rest of Holy Week. In Candaba, my clearest memory of spending Holy Week was the silence. This was a time when all television and most radio broadcasts stopped during Holy Week. And my grandmother was adamant about spending the Holy Week, especially Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, in prayerful silence. Children like me weren’t allowed to play during these days. Laughing was verboten as well.

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