parents. but childless...(for 2 days!)

Last November 2, we opted to leave the 33-month old gogol at my parents house because we thought farm life would do good for his curiosity and his fondness for beds with thick mattresses that he can use in lieu of a good trampoline, which, unfortunately, our house in jaro does not have: no farm life, no 10-inch thick mattresses.

he's also gotten very very fond of getting around with the 6-wheeled (if i recall correctly) truck my parents use for mill operations -- hauling sugarcane stalks form the farm to the mill and hauling muscovado from the mill to our house. Keith was quite unhappy of the latest developments in my parents' house: the den/tv room and living room now converted to a packaging and storage area, because the packaging center has yet to be built and partly because no one "lives" in the house anymore.

after about an hour of waiting at the waiting (how appropriate!!) shed under the burning heat of the 2pm sun and after refusals from 2 ceres buses we decided to flag for the jeepney.

So.

Keith and i bravely fought (and succeeded) the bus seats with the rabid college students because we have no hyper-active toddler to focus our attention to, just our 2 computers and a bag full of adobong baboy that my mother gave us to take to Iloilo for my meat-eating brother. keith was assigned to chase the bus so he can get ahead the rabid students and i was supposed to go up the bus once the coast has been cleared in order to protect the bag full of adobong baboy.

with my computer bag, the adobong baboy bag and the laundry backpack, i had to be assisted by the bus attendant up the bus. it took me 2-minutes to find Keith and settle down with some stranger because the seat which was built to carry 2.5 persons had to contain 3 heads.

i was planning to eat that apple inside my bag but it was too cramped i can't even move to reach for it.

so we traveled fine, moving at about 40 kph and stopping every 10 meters to pick up passengers. but that's not the worst of it because when we went home to Antique 3 days before, the COLORUM van (plate number ZKZ 641) owned by some guy named Aladdin who resides in Bugasong, Antique, crammed TWENTY -- yes that is right 2-0: t-w-e-n-t-y, people, 19 excluding the driver inside. it's a little difficult to visualize but if you imagine 5 people sharing a seat good for 3 then you know what i mean. gogol was with us but he was already asleep before we reached arevalo so he doesn't know a bit of what's happening in the van and how angry i was.

(Mas expert pa sila sa Fisheries-major-in-fish-processing mag-canning ba!)

i won't even mentioned that the colorum van driver even tried to race with the susie star van with plate number FWT 394 somewhere in the mountains. it happened at 7:00 in the evening. if you have traveled to Antique you'll know how dangerous it is. I yelled at the driver to stop racing but i still feel i haven't done anything to stop this hazardous public transport services.

(Keith said one way is to postpone travelling beyond 4pm but i really had to be home that weekend. it's that or the 3am bus. but i think i'll take the 3am bus next time.)

without the gogol around there's also no household help because the help goes wherever gogol goes so our first night as childless parents was celebrated with reheated adobong baboy, rice and cold water. we went up to our room early tired from traveling. Keith went on to play the remaining levels of Plants vs. Zombies; i forgot what i did, i think i tried to reclaim my reading habit because reading has suddenly become a leisure with a toddler around.

(the remaining discussion will focus on Plants vs. Zombies so don't tell me you have not been warned.)

so Keith went on and on playing plants and zombies. when i left for office the next day i saw him with his computer on with the autocad open only to be told in the evening of that day that he practically spent his whole day playing plants vs. zombies. he kinda regretted i introduced him to it but was, at the same time, felt so delighted of his new found hobby.

well, at least even if he doesn't know how to plant he has experienced (virtual) planting, even if it's just in plants vs. zombies. Out first night sans gogol we spent with both our computers open, playing plants vs. zombies for 2 hours. keith tells me, "we have to take this opportunity because we can't do this anymore after gogol's back. "

it's a weird scene, you see: we're as if single, again, and living together but instead of going out for dates or cuddling together or having sex (like we would surely do if we weren't married...eehhh) we stayed in our room, not talking except for very few exchanges, sat a meter away and allowed to be absorbed by plants vs. zombies.

what's weirder is we kinda enjoyed it.

welcome to modern life of childless parenthood.

***gogol came home 2 days after. for 2 days, our house rested, was still, quite and had been very low maintenance. when he arrived together with his grandmother and grandfather, our house was again turned into a playpen cum storeroom, with a turning-deaf grandfather watching tv at maximum volume, a grandmother who turned our house into a muscovado stockroom and gogol whose blocks and miniature cars and trucks scattered around and i thought this must what it feels like to live in Duran area of Iloilo, the biggest dens of squats in the city (eeh...informal settlers). eeeehhh.

history of some sort. PART DEUX.

So we found Rock and Rhythm and we found BJ and his Wendy Says and found the inspiration to start a fanzine. And start we did. Then us 3 girls – Bles, Joy and I -- started spending every weekends together, leading us to some realization that we’re not as homogenous as we thought and that Bles should do the reviews for the Pinoy bands and I should do the review for the indie music – if we could get hold of one, or of what Rofer’s could offer us. I bought a Quicksand cassette from Rofers and Dambuilders and some more I can’t remember. They are as indie as we can get here in Iloilo City. She said she also wanted to write about Frank Zappa. Frank Zappa, for chrissakes!! And I didn’t even have a musical culture prior to Nirvana and so I had to grope my way around for some history. She even listened (with an s??) to Grateful Dead! I only knew Grateful Dead because of the tie-dye fashion and hippies, of course, but nothing beyond that, really. If anybody thought I did, then I might have really acted so well I was able to fool you. But believe me I wasn’t really trying to appear so musically conversant and those were the days of daze…err, identity crisis in music.

Joy…well Joy liked a lot of things and she played some instruments as well. All I can recall was that in my senior year her mother made her burn all her cassettes and fanzines and she was left to listen to nothing but Christian rock. I still have her DC Talk cassette. I recall her talking about this Christian rock band Petra of which I have never heard of. We didn’t talk much about that around their place but their place was memories of sleepover and popcorn and movies…Man on the moon – because one of us had a huge crush on Jason London; Mallrats and Chasing Amy because we liked Jay and Silent bob. I wasn’t able to see Clerks 1 with them anymore. I think I have left for college when they did. But I got to see it last year, now on DVD-convert shit I downloaded from somewhere. I got to see Dogma in a moviehouse because Kevin Smith already went big time. And Joy’s is the room where all day is night and it was always us scrambling out of bed every time, late for some appointment because we overslept. When you turn the lights on and off, the glow in the darks would just light up regardless of the time of the day. It’s always pitch dark in her room.

It took along time for Jenny to return the Disintegration cassette which originally belonged to Fritz. Fritz is the guy who up to this day still hates me for calling him a trust fund baby. I wish he would enlighten me. I think it was Bles who borrowed it and then I borrowed it and then Jenny borrowed it from me and then I think it was Bles who took it from her and returned it to Fritz, who was leaving for Davao then, perhaps 5 or 8 years after this robert smith-haired fritz guy with black rimmed glasses lent it to her. I was with Bles when she met with him, carrying this medium-sized black garbage bag with all his things in it. But I still have his magazines: the very small booklet type Rock and Rhythm with lots of hair band guys on the cover. See, Bles even listens to the cure and I only knew the cure for their Friday I’m in love. I like to HOPE I didn’t hear it first from the baylehans in Antique. God, I hope. Or else we’re not giving any justice to Robert Smith. Or are we?

I’m a little lost on Aiza but she did have a brother who was some kind of a band member. His brother played drums for some local band. She would be the person we would later on beg for the interviews with the local bands. She just disappeared and I also left Iloilo so nothing follows.

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more to come!

history of some sort.

I’ve mostly found my friends through music.

I’d like to think I met Blesela during a Sigabong (clash number I dunno but I first watched it in 1994) in UP Visayas. I’d like to think that my memory serves me right; I seem to recall a scrawny girl in tie-dyed shirt with a backpack slung over her shoulders. if my memory serves me right I may be in my 2^ndyear then because it couldn’t be third year since Sigabong in my 3^rd year. Neither could it be on my senior year because Noreen, the one who introduced me to Bles would have gone to Diliman by then.

Noreen was my petite roommate, a math wizard. Her room was across mine and spent her time reading and listening to metal. Noreen influenced me a lot musically, although I sort of went the other branch of the music tree, eventually. I tried listening to Morbid Angel and Sepultura and Napalm Death and the likes but they didn’t stick, really and I had to give up. But I think it’s what you get for being a well-read rock fan because despite being a metal maniac you remain open to other sub-genres of rock. Noreen also listens to sonic youth and nine inch nails and some really popular bands like nirvana and pearl jam so that spells so much commonality between us. We also both tried so hard to learn guitar but being tone deaf really is an obstacle you need to overcome. I don't think she ever really did master guitar playing and neither did I.

Noreen left for college on my 3^rd year to high school so I was left alone to discover what kind of music really suited my ears. If we stayed together longer I may have developed liking for death metal also. With her gone, I started hanging out with Bles, who introduced me to Joy and Aiza and some other more…there was Jenny and Vanessa and this girl from assumption who’s kind ofstand-offish but in fact is a nice girl when you get to know her, fond of wearing weird earrings. There was no way to spend the day not talking about the bands and the music. We can’t play instruments so we turned to where we’re best at: writing and talking. And there was Blesela’s father who, I learned knew my father, and who also lent me1984when I came to visit Blesela one time. I hope I DID return it.

Rock and Rhythm wave invaded our group just before I left for college. Noreen was also the one who introduced me to the magazine back in high school; she was just 2 years ahead of me. She constantly checked Eddie-Mar newsstand in Delgado St., the one located near the Metrobank and Veterans bank. The place where you’d find people selling puppies and sometimes fishes and fruits some other odd things. Sometimes there’d be a blind man playing guitar with his chord inventions. It used to be a sunny, lively place but veterans fenced the whole area and Raul Gonzales, then a congressman, built a overhead walkway and now it’s not just the nicest place to stroll at.

Rock and rhythm was an underground magazine to us, read: early 90’s. Underground because here, in Iloilo City, it was a little hard to find and very few knew about it. Noreen was so rad she was reading it. And when I did, too, I became the rad girl also. It’s no surprise, Rn’R being an underground magazine inIloilo, because at that time Spin was almost a novelty that only rich kids can afford to buy. You can only find them, Spin, I mean, in IBAM. IBAM also sold porn magazines and rented out pocketbooks and imported magazines as well. You just have to ask the girl at the counter for the porns though, but I only knew about that much later, in my early 20’s when Keith told me. He said maybe the same trick still applies today although I think IBAM greatly suffered from the influx of malls and the National Bookstore, a store posing as a bookstore when it’s actually just a school supplies store and you’re not allowed to touch, more so scan, any fucking book on display. Early 90’s in Iloilo City was when Jollibee was the only national fastfood store andFilbar’s was the comic store, IBAMwas the magazine store, China Artswas the arts supply store, D’Topswas the bookstore and St. Vincent's was the textbook store, Sams was the shoe store, moviehouses were not inside the malls and you’d have to get home before 7pm or else you’d have to walk your way then. Alfredo Diaz was not teaching then because he begun his teaching career as journalism teacher for our elective course in 4^th year high school. in 1996. GaisanoCitywas already standing and the first mall to have a built-in movie house when Alfredo made the historical shriek to our class: “Frogs stop croaking!” . Yes, in 1996. Yes I am digressing.

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okay that ends the first part of my litany. i'll add more when i find time to wake at at 4:30 in the morning to write and finish some paperworks while listening to music and sometimes breaking my heart. but that's just really okay. hate makes us human. anger and aggression, too. also taking sides. too much sweetness and kindness and general lack of opinion for anything is just too boring; too good to be true.

ehhh...they have never had their bubbles burst yet.

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for noreen, bles, joy, vanessa, rn'r gang of idiots...the friends that i dearly miss.

Because

Because long bus rides are lonely and sad and heartbreaking
Because listening to this song breaks my heart
Because I want it to be 1994. or 1995. 1996. 98 99 again. But not the now. Not the last year or the immediate years before that.
Because lasted you haunted me in my dreams
Because it was heartbreaking and I just wanted it to be over.
Because it will give me the satisfaction I wanted, the conviction I wanted when it finally ends.
Because this, for me is redemption.
Because this for me is what I deserved.
Conviction and truth in my words.

NOW THIS REALLY REALLY MAKES ME WANNA LAUGH MY ASS OUT.

i'm giving this 2 thumbs up.