My First International Trip

Last Friday, April 27, 2007, I went on my first international trip going to Dallas, Texas, USA. I had two connecting flights which means I had to ride the plane 3 times. My flight's route was Manila to Taipei, it was about a 2-hour flight with a wait time of about 3 hours, then Taipei to L.A. which was around 10 hours with a wait time of 3 hours again before the last flight from L.A. to Dallas. It was a good thing that I don't get air sick. I've always enjoyed riding roller coasters and the like so riding an airplane was no problem.

At NAIA, I held my breath as my bags were weighed, and I got to breathe normally again when it didn't exceed the 65 kilos allowed for OFWs. When I checked in, I immediately asked for window seats since it was my first flight. Afterwards, I went out of the airport to spend some more time with my Nanay since it was still early. On the way out of the airport, the guard stopped me, and it turned out that he was a former guard in St. Scho and he recognized me. It was indeed a small world.

After spending time with Nanay, I knew I had to go. I knew that I was also afraid but I was more excited at the back of my mind right before the trip. Yet, when I finally said goodbye to my mother, I broke down into tears knowing it would take long before I can see her again, and I verbalized my fear and anxiety about working abroad, or even about travelling that far for the first time.

I had to freshen up a bit before I went to face the immigration officer since my eyes were puffy from crying. I waited in line and when I finally went up to her, she told me that I should have filled out a form. I told her that I wasn't given one and so she told me to go back to where I checked in to get it. I went back and filled it out while lining up again. When I went up the same counter, it was already a different immigration officer. He chatted good-naturedly with me for a while, flirting and saying why I had to go and leave him. I bit my tongue for a sarcastic remark and just smiled and said it's because I have to. After that, my hand-carry bag was placed inside the x-ray machine and I had to take off my shoes. I asked the officer if I had to take off my belt as well and he said yes. He said he didn't notice that I was wearing a belt, and he said he liked my jeans, parang suot daw ng mga Koreana. Whatever that means.

Before I got inside the plane, a guy smiled and made friends with me. He was going to L.A. through a connecting flight as well, so we had the same flight. It was also his first international flight. I was glad because at least I'll know whether or not I was lost.

Inside the airplane I got a seat next to another Filipino and I was grateful. He showed me how to use the TV placed on the back of the seat in front of me. He even offered to give me some Taiwan dollar so that I could buy water just in case I get thirsty in between flights. I told him I was ok and that I was very thankful. Bait talaga ng mga Pinoy. I guess it's because I've been praying to meet good people who would help me on my trip.

I'll continue this later. It's 2 am and I'm sleepy.

American Idol

Yes. I felt like one of the contestants for the American Idol as I sat inside the air conditioned room of the US embassy this afternoon. I was there at 11:00 am but my schedule for interview was at 12:15. I waited inside the anxiety-filled room starting 11:30 am. I was coughing due to the heat from outside. If overdosing yourself with lozenges could happen, I would have been so high by 1:30 because I've already taken like 6 candies so far. And only after 4 lozenges did I notice that it was indicated in the pack that I was supposed to take just one every 2 hours. Good thing I wasn't intoxicated when the first 221g applicant was called. A 221g is given to applicants who have applied yet their application was pending because the consul asked for a document or additional requirement.

The two-hour wait was spent coughing, spitting at the comfort room sink, taking a leak, trying to read my reviewer, praying the rosary and daydreaming of the first time I will see Cefie again in 3 months. At around 12, I thought that the interview will start at exactly 12:15. Well, I was wrong. I had to wait and at 1, I thought the interview will start by 1:15. I already calculated the number of people ahead of me and I talked to God. I said that I hope I will be done with the interview by around 2. When window 12 didn't open by 1:15, I was already so cumbersome. But I was still good natured. What we didn't know was that we will be called in different windows because whoever issued you the 221 g will be the one to interview you again. I didn't know what time I heard my name called at Window 2. And so I saw her again, the pretty young consul who gave me a pending approval. I gave her the letter, she opened it, then excused herself. While she was gone, I was so nervous, and so I started praying. That was when I noticed the clock. The clock struck 2:00 p.m. Somehow, I felt that God was telling me something. The consul went back, asked me one question about my documents, and I answered with one sentence. She asked me to show her my documents and after a few seconds, without really flipping through them, she gave my papers back.

I held my breath as she started typing something in her computer. After the eternity of 10 seconds, she gave me the magical yellow slip and said, "Here you go." I said thank you, turned and never looked back.

I could just imagine myself jumping, yelping up and down outside the room with all of my supporters cheering as I show them my yellow slip. But this wasn't the American Idol, it was simply the elusive, hopefully not so disillusioning, American Dream.

Copy

when we were just starting out

“…looking around there is nothing that I could want, more than to tell you
there’s no more than we’ve already got.” – gin blossoms

Just a while ago, I asked Igme to do something and he answered with the word, “Copy.” And that one word text message almost made me cry when I read it. And it was inevitable that the “why?” after that remark can simply lead to an inverted C-shaped mark with a tale and a dot.

I almost cried because Cef who was my usual text message companion till about 2 months ago, would usually answer using the word ‘copy.’ I remember being infuriated at times when after giving a whole lot of instructions, using up an equivalent of 3 messages per send, he would just answer with, copy. And I’d always complain how he can be so cold, that he didn’t send messages the way he used to, and afterwards I would feel like an angst-ridden teenager as he calmly splashes cold water on my face to kill the childish fever in my head.

I can be so intelligently stupid when it comes to petty arguments with him which we basically have almost everyday. At some point we were already tired of the pseudo scholarly debates we have over a shirt, a tone that was used, an unsaid expectation, or simply over a billiards game, that we even came to the point of saying that maybe the separation would help us both become more mature, and some other nonsense we made ourselves believe just to get over the twinge of being apart.

I called him up after I saw that message from Igme. And as usual, the 33-minute budget card just flew and we were at it again with our squabble which just ended with him not hearing me anymore, and me struggling to be heard till a voice prompt started speaking marking that we’ve already consumed the card.

Our voices were again breaking right before the line was cut. Till after the embassy interview, I will be carrying this luggage of agony of not knowing whether I will already be able to see him or not. And I feel this literally painful sting every time I would think of the days that I would come home without those pensive orbs gazing at me and that teasing grin which would eventually give me a kiss.

And so I pray hard. I pray that I would trust more in God so that I can shoo away these doubts. I pray that I can leave already before April 21, 2007. I pray for my family, his family, and every one else to be blessed. Most of all, as I realize how the most mundane of things could be the ones of the greatest magnitude, I pray that I can hear or read even just a single word from my soul’s poetry as I personally stand before him as he tells me, “copy.”

Internet Geek

I have just consumed three hours surfing the net and accomplishing two utterly sublime things for this blog - 1) Get an account in photo bucket so that I can have a picture URL for my profile (things which were totally alien to me a week ago) and this is thanks to Tonton, and 2) Get a Cbox which literally took me an hour to figure out (that I was already debating whether I was clueless, technophobic, or just outright internet stupid!) which was thanks to Shelly's suggestion.

While I was trying to do all these, I was sending text messages to Mika and Igme just to ask about how to get a tagboard and other needlessly worthy excuses for wasting time, and so at 1:35 am, Mika announced that I was already an Internet Geek. Phew! Who'd have thought!

I posted this because I needed a URL that works for my profile. Haha. I still haven't gotten used to doing this. And low and behold, it didn't work either! It just kept saying that the link was broken. So now of course I am asking, was it the link or me?

The initial post

“Somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond any experience…” – ee cummings

This is the first post. And it feels like the first kiss of the ink and the white page. I have been so wary about writing or even creating a blog for I knew it would always be like some kind of literary challenge for me to write an entry. I cannot discount the fact that being a teacher, a literature teacher for that matter, would of course rouse certain expectations from students just in case they happen to see this blog.

I’m at ease with friends though. With them, I can simply be the old seemingly-a-butch-hunched-girl who liked Math and Science, who carried her inhaler as if there was a secret pocket in her skin just for it, spent a good deal of time in the prefect of discipline and principal’s office during her high school days, tied her classmates’ shoelaces, was a proud member of the NTBO, ate four cups of rice and 3 BBQ sticks during the 20-minute recess, wore brown sandals during the prom (To Shelly who couldn’t fathom and is certainly choking at the sight of it - I’d rather wear something comfortable instead of using the white shoes I wore with the pink gown (ugh!) for the cotillion which gave me a shit load of blisters. I have really sensitive feet!), and was rather the closet literature lover/aspiring fictionist or poet whose eccentricity is well known but whose depth is only for a few.

Yet the idea of a blog excites me. I’d like to state my acknowledgments to Shelly Toribio and Tonton Guerrero before I have a memory gap. Anyway, it excites me because the net to me is like a galaxy well, and with each bucket, you pull gallons of different waters of constellations, meteors, satellites, all from the same well, forgive the analogy. I was even thinking of an anonymous blog so that I can simply be a nameless dot in the void and only I, knew that there is some significance in it because only I know that it exists…and that’s stirring. (Niño/Igme sprouted this idea last night.) I know, I know, time to consult a Freud enthusiast.

So now, I’m bemusedly grinning, seeing that I have written three paragraphs when I was adamant to write even just a line a few minutes ago. I guess like Cefie’s eyes, this would be another place which I have never traveled, yet am gratefully and gladly experiencing.

My foreword from the LIT folio SY 2006-2007

Moi holding the folio LIT for SY 2006-2007
My ever reliable officers taking instructions from the Volderator/Moderator. =)

Pictures thanks to Nikki Calayan

Reminiscence


The noun of the verb,
that state of cognition,
the stating of the fact

that it indeed transpire –
the feeble stalwart words
ending in the future tense,
never reaching a period.

Yet, though deceiving,
I have always thought of it
as the verb of actuality.

To know that even just in the mind,
one can take a picture of a
leisurely landing leaf,
or a waning gibbous.

To own that even just in the mind,
I saw through deep set pensive orbs,
I heard the most sonorous whisper,
and I held a firm calloused hand.

Only then can I confirm that
the you,
the I,
and the We
existed.

How language can work to affirm or to deceive is as real as each dead star giving us light that has long expired. Reminiscence, the theme of this folio for SY 2006-2007 is as much a noun as it is the verb, for it is the act or the “action” of remembrance.

Writers and everyone else are as much free persons and captives of memory. Like photographs, we are able to confine a moment – a smirk, a leap, a boisterous laugh, a tear, a sigh, into a mental photo album which we can leaf through again and again.

Yet sometimes it is the photograph that imprisons the photographer. We either leaf through the album and become part of the pages, not wanting to make another album, or we get stung as we reach for even an inch of the cover.

There are so many things in our memories that we’d like to edit, delete or even recreate. And that is where the power and the danger of reminiscence lie. Only in the mind can we embrace the truth or alter it into our truth. Only in that past tense can we say that I did it, I had it, and I will always have it. Only in our reminisces can we say that it is ours, and that nobody can ever take it or him or her away. And only there can we say that I exist because I have a memory of what it was like before I started existing.

As you read through the contents of this folio, may our reminiscence trigger you to remember that in the beautifully scarred landscape of the mind, we can always run under the sprinklers and dance as if we were under the rain.