Anonymous

In a Makati-bound shuttle similar to a schoolbus—two long seats, backrests below the windows at opposite sides of the vehicle, separated by a narrow aisle:

A woman in her mid-forties, fussy peroxided curls, tight lemon yellow baby tee, straight black schoolteacher slacks cinched around a full waist. Flesh-colored full panties, synthetic, peeking as she bends over. Canvas handbag with embroidered trains and checks, three-inch plastic Donald Duck keychain. Chunky candybar phone, entry-level, oversized letters, tiny screen. Translucent plastic rosary beads, shiny faux silver medal smaller than a peso in lieu of a crucifix.

A woman in her mid-thirties, mocha skin, wavy hair ponied at the base of her neck. Heart-shaped face, small eyes and nose, abbreviated eyebrows. Dry peeling lips, full, tired. Small, capable hands. Centimeter-long fingernails kept meticulously clean. Silver chain and pendant, slightly tarnished. Corduroy boatneck top, black, elbow-length sleeves, sliver of slender white bra strap near her shoulder. Dusty black pants. Black rectangular backpack, laptop size, molded rubber support pads at the base. Fat little hardcover book on economic/legal matters, heavily annotated in bright blue ink.

***

At the far end of the right-hand seat, as seen from the middle of the left-hand seat:

A young man in his early twenties, large eyes and rabbit teeth from a distantly remembered childhood. No longer scrawny—a grotesque tattooed monster snarls from an enlarged bicep half-hidden under the sleeve of a slightly rumpled polo shirt—but still short, still only inches taller. Hair growing over a recently shaved skull. Hands overridden with veins, (perhaps) scars lurking beneath fabric. Slim, elongated black bag, zipped shut, containing small items that make no sound when disturbed. A wistful, almost childish look of exhaustion during brief, stolen naps. A face grown somewhat sharper, somewhat older, with the inevitable (yet still incomplete) angularity of manhood.


—
Note: Forgive me for being lazy with this post... This is just a handful of loosely-connected character studies focusing on the external appearance ('cause I tend to fixate on that ^^;;). I didn't really intend for them to have any kind of structure; I guess that's something I can try to come up with in the future, when I'm not so busy with the day job. ^^;

Young

It's easier not to say anything when my mother complains. When she unties her hair in the confines of her room, big brush in hand. When she pauses, expecting me to agree. When she changes the topic to something that doesn't cause her grief, or remind her of the mistake she made at the altar decades before. It's easier to sit silently by her side as she pours out her frustrations, although it's not so easy to be young and still dependent on the cause of her pain.

No, it's not so easy to be unable to say anything other than empty words of comfort.


---
Note: Having fun with my new phone ^^ It's got this little memo application that can save a memo of up to 1000 characters. I know it sounds silly, but this looked a lot longer while I was keying it out on my phone XP hehe. Now this post seems way too short, and vague. ^^; Minimalist I'm not, I guess.

Advice for Sandwich Eaters

If you're going to pack sandwiches for a snack and you have a regular 8 to 5 (in my case, 9 to 6) job, you should never pack them the night before. Pack them in the morning, just before you leave for work. If you don't, they're going to taste funny, as the following story will attest.

On the eve before my first day at work I was a bit excited - I made my sandwiches myself (partly to save my mother the trouble of making them the following morning, partly 'cause I wanted them to be just right :P). One with orange marmalade on white bread, another with my mother's chicken salad on whole-wheat bread. I wrapped them in plastic and stowed them away in the refrigerator for safekeeping. The next day, while I was seated in the shuttle on my way home, I could already feel the hunger pangs gnawing at my gut; eagerly I fished out the orange-marmalade sandwich and bit into it. It was a bit flat, since it had spent the better part of the day squished in between my lunch box and my bottle of water, but that wasn't what worried me - I could barely taste anything in it, apart from the bread. There was this barely noticeable layer of moistness that made the middle of the sandwich a bit mushy; it was the only proof I had that I had packed myself a sandwich, and not just a couple of slices of white bread. I finished it and started on the chicken-salad sandwich. That one was very much like the one that had preceded it, except that the bread was grainier and there were these little dehydrated bits of meat in between the bread slices. It was then that I figured out what should've occurred to me the night before.

The bread had had almost a full day to absorb the liquid parts of the filling; sadly, for some reason it didn't absorb the corresponding flavors. The following day, when I ate the sandwiches my mother had packed earlier that morning (strawberry jam on white bread and chicken salad on whole-wheat bread), I confirmed my suspicions: the bread hadn't had enough time to absorb all of the filling, and I could still taste the stuff that went in between the bread, like pureed strawberries or mayonnaise and pickle relish. Eureka. Another minor epiphany that (sort of) improves the quality of my life.

And so, I reiterate my advice: if you're going to pack sandwiches and you won't be able to eat them for several hours, don't pack them the night before. Pack them just before you leave. They'll taste better, trust me.


PS I was going to write about the programming I've been doing, but I figured that would be incredibly boring so I settled for the next best thing. :D Strawberry jam rules. \m/

Hai World

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

Message from an alien planet? Maybe, if LOLcats were aliens with a rudimentary knowledge of structured programming. This is the classic Hello World program in LOLCODE, a programming language inspired by LOLspeak (the slang used in LOLcats). I've got a weakness for all things cute, and the minute I saw this tiny program I couldn't help myself. It's. Just. So. Cute. X333 Blatant disregard for grammar and horrendous misspellings aside.

For someone who's familiar with programming, LOLCODE isn't that hard to understand. It's actually almost like pseudocode, since it uses human-readable phrases as statements. So far, it seems like the language hasn't been developed much... It would be really interesting if it could be. I think I'd enjoy writing programs with it. ^^ (Can't imagine writing anything really big with it though...debugging would be hellish. XD)

Here's another LOLCODE program for my...I mean your enjoyment. :D It prints the contents of a text file to the screen.

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
PLZ OPEN FILE "LOLCATS.TXT"?
AWSUM THX
VISIBLE FILE
O NOES
INVISIBLE "ERROR!"
KTHXBYE

PS If esoteric programming languages like this one are your thing, you might wanna check out brainfuck and Whitespace; they're pretty amusing, to say the least. ^^

PPS I also liked this "translation" of Rizal's Mi Ultimo Adios into LOLspeak. ^^; Yeah, I know, too much cuteness. And there's probably something fundamentally wrong with referring to a country as a "cheezburger," and its national hero as a "kitteh". But anyway, I especially liked the third stanza, where the blood which Rizal offers to the Fatherland is referred to as "red splashies." Cuteness. XD

Scents

Three-day-old beddings. Slightly dingy teddy bear. Threadbare Winnie-the-Pooh pillow, already torn at the corners.


Daing na bangus, fried and salty. Cold, juicy tomato wedges. Vinegar and soy sauce mixed in a tiny bowl. Unsweetened pineapple juice.


Pale blue mint toothpaste.

Papaya soap. Apple shampoo. Coconut conditioner.

Lavender baby powder. Floral-scented deodorant. Perfumed body lotion and hair polish.

Sticky-sweet baby cologne.


Remnants of smoke from garbage fires. Exhaust fumes.

The first honest patches of sweat under my armpits, around my breasts, at the small of my back, between my shoulder blades, above the curve of my stomach, on my nape, near my collarbone.


Later in the day a friend tells me, "You still smell the way you used to." Exactly which smell she's referring to, I'm not quite sure.


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Note: Finally, I'm beginning to live up to the title of my blog. Today's post is mostly half truths about me ^^ I'm not sure if I made the right decision with first-person POV, but third-person seems a little awkward...

Wishful Thinking

Each glance is like a message, given either with careful intent or without a second thought. The lingering of eyes on eyes, the questioning curve of an open mouth, thoughts failing to make the transition into words. There is that brief spark of something - yearning, infatuation, desire, endless dubious possibilities - that struggles against the strictures of circumstance, often only to fail and evaporate.

He's ahead of them, his pace quickened by the power of his calf muscles. Dina, the girl she often talks to in class, is jogging beside her; the semester is almost over, and she's asking for Dina's contact information. Dina smiles as she agrees to give them later. At the sound of the words "phone number" and "email address," he turns to look at them for a few seconds. It's the first time he's ever looked her way during the warm-up jog before class.

Infatuation is a tricky thing: it convinces the stricken that her object of affection is worth the hours of sudden, irrational kilig, of contemplating a dozen possible futures (all of which, in truth, veer very close to impossibility), of agonizing over missed chances. It gives her the impression of reciprocation where, in all likelihood, there is only indifference. It feeds a steadily burning ember of longing that will send forth several little flames, each one more brilliant than the next, before finally collapsing into a small, mixed pile of memories.

On the last day of class her classmates bring out cameras and start snapping away. She poses shyly, a short girl with tanned skin and eyes that are reduced to slits when she smiles. In a few of the photos he's right beside her; she leans a little to her left, and he leans a little to his right. They both smile widely for the cameras.

Opportunities are still opportunities, however. Every awkward conversation, for all its sterility, may yet lead to something more. A friendship? A new love? A fleeting acquaintance, never to be remembered? It is difficult to say, at best. But the admirer continues to have faith in her flighty emotions; she persists, overcoming fears of rejection and humiliation. She grabs whatever awkward moments come her way. After all, there's always that possibility of something more, however small.

They talk of common subjects, teachers, grades. The conversation has more pauses than anything else. When she asks him about whether he likes the same things she does, he says he feels like an interviewee. She takes this as a bad sign - hours later, she'll be sorry she didn't tell him stories about what she likes, instead of just asking him if he has the same interests - but there's still a little room for hope. Even though the class is over, they might be able to talk online; there, behind glowing, impersonal computer screens, they might not be so awkward. If he decides to reply to the cheery messages she plans to send. If she's lucky.

Sunday at the University

This isn't the first time that I didn't go home for the weekend, but this is probably the first Sunday that I walked around a bit and saw how sleepy UP can be. I was on my way to meet one of the graduate students from my thesis lab; I figured I would walk, since I wasn't sure if there were any Ikot jeepneys around. I was already at Molave Residence Hall when an Ikot passed by, empty save for a handful of passengers. It rumbled along at a leisurely pace, unmindful of the conspicuous lack of vehicles on the roads. I suppose neither the driver nor the passengers were in any hurry to get anywhere.

When I reached the road on the right of Engineering I came across rows of cars and SUVs parked beside the sidewalks. The road had temporarily been closed off from the intersection that joined it to the Academic Oval; joggers of all ages clogged the Oval with a continuous flow of human traffic. Many of them ran in groups, chatting amongst themselves as they took advantage of the empty Oval to run outside the bike lane. A man and a woman were playing badminton on the road next to the lagoon. I hunted around for the cyclists who hung out at the food kiosk in front of the Faculty Center; in their helmets and brightly colored tights, they whiz past the joggers on the Oval during the weekdays. They were nowhere to be found.

By the time I had passed the Faculty Center I was feeling a little hungry, but the tiny sidewalk stall of my suki for monay was deserted. The large blue cooler that she kept her bottles of C2 and water in was bound to her wooden table with a rusty chain; the colorful beach umbrella that shaded her from the weather wasn't there. The other food stalls on the street were similarly devoid of their usual occupants. If I wanted to grab a bite to eat I'd have to go all the way back to the Shopping Center, whose eateries are open all seven days of the week. At that moment I marvelled at the many ways in which the UP community catered to one of its basic needs: convenient, cheap food. On a weekday I could have had my pick of fishballs or footlong hotdogs, taho, dirty ice cream or cheesecorn. Or, if I had had a half hour to spare, I could have gone to CASAA or Katag, the canteens nearest to me at the time. (I suppose I should also mention Kenneth's Kitchen, the canteen at NISMED, but I've never eaten there, and I keep forgetting that it's near the Faculty Center. ^^;)

The road to the second Engineering Library's building (also the home of the Department of Computer Science :D) was the emptiest and quietest of all. I could hear the birds and insects in the trees, and the perpetual wheezing of the telephone and electricity cables overhead. I was almost at MSI when I heard the first rumble of an approaching vehicle; it was a half-empty Ikot. The morning sun was beginning to sting my skin. When I got to the waiting shed in front of Science I sat down on the raised concrete, there being no one around to notice. On top of the hill across the road, my department's building stood desolate, like the proverbial haunted building. One of its glass doors was open; there was no sign of the graduate student I was supposed to meet. I pulled out my cellphone, sent her a message and proceeded to wait. A few more Ikots passed, each one slowing down in front of me and honking like a persistent hawker. I ignored them.

It would be several more minutes (or at least, it felt that way) before I heard a familiar voice calling my name across the road. I got up, waved, and hurried to where she was; there was little need for caution, since the road was empty. The sun beat down on us, all vestiges of early morning cold already gone. I felt sleepy and more than a little hungry. I envied one of my roommates, whom I had left sleeping contentedly thirty minutes before. A slow Sunday like this one is just perfect for sleeping in; unfortunately, I had to help one of my thesis lab's advisers with a last-minute errand. Sigh. Oh well.