The Gift

When you've been in a relationship with the same person for like forever, you find that you become less sappy as the years pass by. Sure, stuffed toys, flowers and boxes of chocolates are cute during the courtship stage. But time will come when you'll find yourself appreciating the weirdest tokens of affection the most.

Case in point:

A few days ago, I sustained blisters on my fingers after manually washing my dirty clothes. We still don't have a washing machine at home, that's why. It was very painful afterwards, and I called my Curly Top's attention to this. I was actually just exaggerating how painful my fingers were so that he'd take pity on me and hopefully buy me a washing machine! 

We were doing our weekly grocery shopping this morning, and I didn't notice that he slipped an item into the shopping cart. When we got home, he presented me with a very thoughtful gift:

This made me smile...

My new pink latex gloves really made my day! I can't wait to do my laundry this week, it's going to be fun and blister-free!

Pray for Boston

As an off-shore fraud analyst for a major U.S. bank, a typical day in my life consists of talking on the phone to at least fifty credit card account holders--Americans located halfway across the world from where I am physically located. Part of the job requires me to be at the office during ungodly local hours, which is simply noon to early evening in Eastern Standard Time. Embracing the U.S. timezone because it is essential to my work schedule has another downside apart from keeping the hours of a living dead. It causes me to have the tendency to be a day late in paying bills, or thinking that an anniversary or birthday is tomorrow when in fact it is already today.

Another thing about being an employee of a U.S. firm, is that I am more updated with their current affairs and news than I am of what is happening here at the home-front. In fact, I am currently following the horrific events unfolding in Watertown, Mass. where there is an ongoing manhunt for the two brothers believed to be responsible for the bombings during the Boston Marathon last Monday.

It's so hard to imagine what could have driven these suspects to resort to such acts of violence, harming so many people, claiming innocent lives. As I'm watching the news right now, it's early evening where I am, and it's early morning in Boston where the police just had the longest night of their lives, chasing and exchanging shots with the violent suspects, killing one and still chasing the other who managed to escape. It's like watching a scene from an action movie, but what's really disturbing is the knowledge that it is for real, and no movie director is about to yell "Cut!" any time soon.

Of Hemophobia and Water Slides

There are so many things in this world that scare me. I'm afraid of amusement park rides and water slides because the sensation of falling terrifies me. I'm afraid of traveling alone to an unfamiliar place because I have this crazy thing going on in my head wherein I have to always know where I am exactly in relation to the surface of the earth, like an internal Google Earth app or GPS in my brain, and if I can no longer mentally track where my coordinates are, I panic!

I used to also be afraid of blood and gore, not because I'm nag-iinarte, but because when I was in high school I was riding a jeepney to school one day and witnessed a motorcycle accident along the highway. Right at the very moment when I turned my head to see what the commotion was about, the scene that welcomed my sight was a lot of blood spilling from the helmet of the motorist who was sprawled on the ground. Since then, I've developed an aversion to the red sticky substance that is blood. I get nauseous and my stomach turns if I accidentally see a lot of it, whether live or from TV or the movies. Whenever I need to get my blood drawn for a medical laboratory test, I always look away from the actual blood-sucking syringe, lest I faint. So as a general rule, I try not to watch gory movies and TV shows where there will be blood spewing and decapitation and the like. If I do watch these kinds of films, it's usually because I was forced or blackmailed into it by either my siblings or my boyfriend or my friends. I have never seen a single SAW movie. I watched the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie but I automatically covered my eyes whenever the music shifted to the suspense scoring, suggesting that somebody is about to get maimed or skewered. I did the same for Final Destination, Wrong Turn, and other movies of the same genre. Personally, I find it a waste of time and a source of zero fun at all.

I didn't really read much into my hate affair with blood until an incident in 2008 when I suffered a head concussion that sent me straight to the emergency room. It was all because I cut myself on a piece of broken glass during dinner, and the sight of my own blood scared me to the point of blacking out. When I came around, I was lying down on the floor, heaving the contents of my stomach out and straight into my sister's helping arm, and I had a massive bump at the back of my cranium. I spent the night in the E.R. but thankfully they released me soon after my head scans revealed that my skull was good at its job after all, and was dutifully able to protect the squishy mush inside it that is my brain. See? My darn fear of blood almost killed me.

My trip to the ER, circa 2008

Don't even get me started about how duwag I am with ghost stories! I am the worst person to tell scary, supernatural stories to, because I would imagine all sorts of scenarios and obsess about them to the point where I can no longer function normally. I can't go to the bathroom, brush my teeth, or sleep without someone accompanying me. And I would literally have nightmares. So yeah, I also avoid (and detest) people who like talking about scary stuff. They are hazardous to my sanity.

I'm not really sure why I suddenly decided to talk about my irrational fears tonight. Maybe because I'm home alone and starting to kinda feel scared? Help!

Proud Sister!

March and April are graduation months here in the Philippines, and I'm so happy because my two youngest brothers were among those who happily marched to join the ranks of graduates for school year 2012-2013. Our bunso, CJ, graduated from elementary school last week, while his kuya Jicjic graduated today from college, as cum laude! I am such a proud Ate! 

Kudos, my loves!

The boys with our dearest (stage) mother!

April Fool

Every year whenever April 1st comes around, there is only one thing in my mind: the memory of possibly the cruelest April Fools joke ever played on somebody so many years (was it a lifetime?) ago. The memory involves a girl and a boy and their unspoken feelings for each other..and the girl deciding that she can no longer keep her feelings a secret so she blurted it out one morning, on the first day of April, telling the boy that she loves him. Moments later, she realized it was a mistake to expose herself like that. She felt vulnerable and scared, and her quick thinking saved her when she suddenly remembered what day it was, and exclaimed, "Happy April Fools!" The whole time, the boy was speechless, awestruck, and flabbergasted. Then he just walked away. Many years later, the girl was finally able to admit to him that on that day, too many Aprils ago, she was the real fool.