and the winner of a vat of acohol is...

darling rocker ex! Specifically, his band named after boiled chicken embryos.

at the m u z i k l a b a n this year. Their monumental break into the music industry. Amid pledges of bringing into the mainstream "ang tunog ng norte" i.e. bageeyow city, here i have to ask. tunog ng norte/ baguio? Is that the sound of the slow, painfully drawn out death of the atmosphere, and the little sizzle sizzle of the rising temperature in Baguio due to pollution and overpopulation? The sound of gongs and swishing ethnic G-strings? Or is their brand of emo-rock the all encompassing sound of the summer capital of the pilipens? Dunno. We'll see though, once they release an album. And a video, at which point I shall tune out and crawl into my little ex-girlfriend hole.

i hear they won a hundred crates of R e d H o r s e B e e r and are funneling the booze through thick plastic tubes to their friends back home in Baguio. Proof of which is that I just got a YM message from one of the band's very kooky, and decidedly drunk friends rejoicing at their newfound liquor fountain. Orgiastic alcohol post-victory party which will go on every day till December right into the New Year, at which point, I warned them, they'd get a BIG FAT HANGOVER and no liver to speak of.

But, you might notice, am I ranting because I'm bitter like the beer they rocked out to and won? Mmmmmmm.......... yeah.

Cos I'm envious, like the selfish and vain little twit that I am, that He my glorious rocker ex has finally gotten his penultimate dream to make sweet sweet music/love/babies forever and ever amen and get paid to do it (and at such a young age too). While I am here, mildly nostalgic, stirringly hung-up, and doing a PAPER for a profession that will someday get me shot, mauled, libeled, jailed, and/or deprived of sleep. A few years from now, he will be a magnificent thick-maned god to whom goblets of RAWK will be raised and I'll be a dead journalist criminal woman with large eyebags. He'll have groupies. I'll have... a collection of pencils.

Or maybe I'm just bitter that an A M A J o l i n a boy can make it and a U P student can't.

Fire In the Hole

It's so sad what happened this morning.

Our neighbor's house burned down. :-(

The scary thing was that this happened right in front of our house, facing OUR second floor window, right across the street and I DIDN'T HEAR it!! Or smell it or sense it.

My Mom, who hibernates at a room across the hall was the one who heard an explosion at about 5 a.m. Miggy's yaya, Manang Inday, also heard the explosion and called my Mom up to say, "Ati!! Sumabog po yung kotsi!!" Whereas, my Mom thought the explosion meant that my brother just fell from his bed or something. (I mean, Picture it: Nico's sleeping. He falls from his bed, then *explosion!!!*")

I woke up only when she was fiddling with our window locks, trying to get a look at our allegedly burning car, when she saw it and said (very un-Christian-like, I might add, Mommy) "Oh shit! Our neighbor's house is burning like hell!!!"

My first impulse was to run down to the front door to hear if anyone was screaming from inside. (All the neighbors at this point were doing what neighbors usually do. Standing on the street watching it burn.) The neighbor to burning house's immediate right, on the other hand, were trying to herd/ save their 93783692761928 luxury cars away from the garage. The general's wife was hysterical.

My second impulse was to grab the phone and dial the general directory to ask for Camp Aguinaldo's fire department's number. The stupid woman, and I will sue you "Ms. 187-Good-Morning-This-Is-Becky-How-May-I-Help-You, gave me a number, I dialled it and...

"Malacanang Fire Station, Hello?"

"OH FUCK, NOT YOU!! FUCK!!" *slam down phone*


The second woman I rang gave me Camp Aguinaldo's hotline number. BUT NO ONE WAS ANSWERING!!

I gave up, and my Dad basically wrung the phone from me (very calmly so) and dialled 117. The Emergency number. I don't know if he got the number of the fire department.

The sad thing, people, is that the Camp Aguinaldo Station is only two blocks from our street. It is a mere 7-minute jog to get there. I hope someone ran there or something.

I joined the horrified spectators (all the colonels and generals in their jammies!! hahahaha!!!) watching the scene, listening to the pop and shatter of the house's glass jalousies, and the thick black smoke traveling like graceful currents on the tin garage roof.

It's actually jarring to see such a thing: a house burning and not knowing what to do. It's like you're immune to it from seeing it happen so many times on television, but when it's so immediate and so close, it's almost surreal.

About 5 whole minutes later, by my measure, the Fire trucks came. The neighbors to our left, usually tightly shut inside their home refusing to see anyone, were complaining, "Ang tagal! Ang tagal naman dumating!" I agreed, initially, ready to write it off as a shoddy performance as usual by a notoriously inept government agency. But my Dad, oh-level-headed-one-in-a-crisis, said to me, "Yes. Alam natin ngayon lang sila dumating. Pero hindi rin naman natin alam kung kailan sila natawagan." O nga naman. Baka late rin lang sila natawagan cause no one on our frickin street knows their phone number.

If there was anything shoddy about the fire people (I say this because there were fire men and fire girls), was that some of them were wearing boxers and sando beneath their yellow fireproof uniforms. Thank goodness no one was in briefs. Their fire chief, a rather hefty fellow, was the only guy who was in complete uniform.

But hey, they stopped the fire at precisely 5:30 a.m. And did all the standard procedure stuff like:
1_ ask who the resident of burnt house is (a very snooty woman who inherited the place from her soldier relative. who shouldn't legally be living in the house because soldier relative died eons ago and hence is no longer in service. who is a civilian employee of the AFP insurance thingy. who doesn't really USE or LIVE IN the house but comes to visit once a month to clean and feed her usually starved dog chained to the back of the house. who, once we saw the quantity of stuff inside the house later on when she checked whatever was left to salvage, that she'd been using the house as her own personal warehouse.)

2_break down the front door with a mallet and further hose it down. (At this point there was this camera crew joining the action, filming us shocked and traumatized neighbors in our jammies and eyebags and wiry hair dear god dear god i hope they don't publish that!) Not contented with that, a new group of firemen in better gear gave the house another bath later on whilst my Mom went all excited. "Tin! There's new high-tech firemen na hosing the house!"

3_check if the dog's okay. And I annoyed, harassed, and badgered the fire chief into making absolutely sure that the animals in the periphery were okay. My brother was mocking me. "Ate, if the dog's burnt na, they'll just take the carcass and eat it as pulutan!!"

4_check if everyone else is okay.

At least there was water in their tanks this time. See, before our present house was constructed, the previous house also burned to the ground and in precisely the same circumstances (faulty gas lines) but at that time, the fire department DID respond to the scene but to their complete and utter humiliation, their tanks were dry. So, like, the house burned to ashes, including the previous occupants' grandma.

Save for the woman, who arrived about halfway through the inspection-of-cause-of-fire process, and who numbly tried to rescue what possessions were left amongst the smoking embers and blackened rooms, all was well and there were no casualties.

Soon, as all else who weren't awakened by the ruckus were rising to make breakfast and were getting ready to drive their kids to school, the problem evolved into how-in-hell they can get their cars out to leave for work since there were about four huge fire engines parked on our street.

When it was clear that the scene was coming to a close, and that everyone can go into their houses now cos hefty-fire-chief's got it all under control, sans the lone PNP dude who also came to check it out, my parents joked that I should make a (news) story about it. Here I am.

As the sky got gradually lighter, and the firemen got on their boxer-clad asses and left the scene, Mom, always spelling out the lessons for every tragedy, gave us a fifteen-minute lecture on the importance of always posting up emergency phone numbers near our phone, of how we should practice climbing out of the special second-story fire-exit-window Dad ordered to be made to see if she'd fit through ("Paano kung hindi ako magkasya sa bintana? Iiwanan niyo na ako." Dad replies, "Basta magkasya yung ulo mo sa window. Para at least kung iwanan ka namin pwede ka pang makasigaw, humingi ng saklolo *evil grin*"), of how we should always be vigilant about these things and how see? see? see?? she's so right in badgering and training us to always check that all the plugs are unplugged and all the chargers aren't charging at night. "basta if there's a fire, just save yourselves!"

Then Dad gives us another pep talk on much the same thing except he dwelt more on the keeping-calm-during-a-crisis-thing.

Which was all good fun for the first two seconds.

I didn't have time to process it all, all those philosophical interpretations of how there are things more important than things, and how life is so fragile bladibladibla because I wandered back to my room, and continued sleeping.

badminton

My parents carted me off to V.Luna's tiny badminton court with no ventilation and a bathroom overflowing with water to (surprise) play and shed off the unwanted calories of sloth.

Sort of like the rare show of parental affection, my Dad started "teaching" (meaning, shouting at and/or feigning patience tipong 'she's my daughter and I love her repeat 800 times') me whilst I tried REALLY hard to give POWERRR to my smash. "POWER iha, POWER!"

Ibig sabihin lang nun, i-clench mo yung ass mo as you're jumping to meet the shuttlecock and then, i-channel mo lahaaaaat ng sama ng loob mo, lahat ng hate mo sa life, lahat ng times na sinabi sayo ng parents mo na hindi ka nila bibigyan ng Xbox for Christmas and then REEEEELEEEEEAAAAAASSSSSEEEEEE!!!!!!

And then kaplut. The stupid feather ball hits the net. and I have to walk that agonizing distance to the middle of the court and pick it up.

The trick is to shout really really loud (roooooaaaarrrr!!!) to give the illusion that you're hitting the ball really hard and with every fiber of your being.

When I was soaked through my shirt in sweat and essences, and after the nth time I had to hear the word 'power' yelled to my face, my dad gave up and entrusted me to the care of the TINDERA of the store inside the littlegym.

Her name is Manang Inday and she had to "train" me...
But she is frickin galing, man! Like, who knew a tindera of chips and bottled water and shuttlecocks-for-rent would be so good!! And a good teacher!! I mean, she doesn't get all agitated when you trip all over yourself and panic when the returns get faster. and she doesn't rue the day she had lazy-ass offspring who didn't know jack shit about racket sports.

Pero I wasn't inept naman ng sobra. We even won a rallypoint with Mom and Dad playing the other team and me and Inday on the other. 90% of the time, I was just there, posing with extra game face for effect pero actually, Inday was the one fielding all the passes. Tipong, if I walked out of there, she'd still win against the combined effort of my parents-- hands down.

But still, ha!! I, the useless appendage of Inday the Tindera, scored the final point (with a gut-wrenching smash that made me think "Dear-sweet-lord-I-won't-be-able-to-move-my-arm-tomorrow") which officially ended the game and left my parents to cry and re-evaluate their marriage. ("You call this teamwork??? S*$%#@!!!)

Hahah!!!

So what if I now can't move my shoulder, or that my biceps have seized functioning, and that I am in dire need of a deep-muscle body massage? So what if my ass hurts from all the clenching and my hamstrings are probably fried?

'Cause, for that one glorious millisecond, I finally got the POWER.