Everyone in his life has that one pivotal moment that would have changed history. That one little thing that you never knew at that time would could affect everything that you would do for the rest of your life.
Imagine if Slash’s guitar teacher didn’t dissuade him from playing bass. There would never have been that Sweet Child of Mine guitar solo, or Guns N’ Roses for that matter. Imagine, Slash, a failed bass player.
Or what if James Hetfield decided to cut his hair as his football coach told him to and proceeded to play football and got distracted from playing music. There would not have been a Metallica.
I have yet to remember or rediscover that pivotal moment in my life, that one little decision that would have changed everything, that one little thing that seemed inconsequential at that time but it turned out to be pivotal later on. Maybe it’s when I decided not to join my theater group to the national theater festival at the Cultural Center of the Philippines when I was finishing my thesis. I don’t know. I wouldn’t know if I would have become a better actress if I continued. I don’t know if I would have lasted in theater.
All these stories about pivotal moments left me with one thing: go with what your gut tells you.
I had a lovely drive yesterday to my hometown to pick up my other daughter after she spent three weeks with her grandma and cousins.
On the way there, I passed by a huge fire along the highway that was causing some traffic build up. When I passed by the houses engulfed by the flames, I could feel the heat even inside my airconditioned car. Even the trees were on fire.
Fire! Photo by CallMeCreation.com
Before proceeding to my mom’s house, I drove around the campus to catch a glimpse of my old stomping ground.
I used to bring the girls here every summer when they were younger, with mats for some kind of picnic so they can run around. We flew kites too. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
It was beautiful but eerie due to absence of humans. I would have loved to lie on my back on that green grass to stare at the blue sky. But the roving police will surely apprehend me as they are still on a lockdown.
Football field without the goal posts. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I spent countless afternoons here playing football in high school and college, rain or shine. This used to be teeming with football players and athletics varsity players. I remember plunking on the grass with my sports bag every afternoon to put on my knee pads, knee socks and football boots. And gloves. Yes, I was a goal keeper. Oh how I *loved* rolling in the mud.
On the way back to Manila, I dropped off my nephew at their house and took this photo of the road that leads to bypass mountain road. I love taking this bypass road.
Photo by CallMeCreation.com
It was already dark when we arrived at home. It was nice to get out of my cave and drive to see some greenery.
I always thought that if I were an Indian woman and thin, he would have been much nicer to me and valued me more. He loves India and his nurse friend in Singapore told me he dated an Indian woman before me and that J is fond of Indian women. I remember an Indian man who J and I chatted with when we were about to try his newly opened food kiosk and he said he thought I had come from Northern India and he said I looked like one of them (it must be my black eyeliner). Then I turned to J and gave him a look that said, āOhhhh now it makes more sense now!ā He just gave me back a sheepish look, like he couldnāt explain himself. So adding up all the things I have been ruminating over the past months, I conclude that I have the wrong nationality and live in the wrong country. In short, I never had a chance so I shouldnāt have held any illusions. It could have saved me a lot of heartache. š¤¦š»āāļø
As I said, I was just a space-filler.
So yeah, better to be alone than to forever question why was I not being valued when I had put this person above anything else. I must put into writing on my wall that I donāt need anybody to make me feel I have value. I need to convince myself over and over. What happened didnāt help my very low self-esteem at all and it would take me quite a while to find where my dignity and self-worth have gone.
But in the process of healing and self-discovery, I should enjoy my solo life and move forward. Plan for the things that I would do after the pandemic. Life is too beautiful to be dragged down by the past and people who have just discarded me like that.
It’s so freaking hot today and there’s no incentive for me to go out of my airconditioned room.
Rose tea. For my mental health. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
The flower teas I ordered online finally arrived this morning. They’re fragrant and calming to drink even though they needed to be consumed hot. So I started the day with a pot of rose tea and then I had back to back calls. And back to back stories.
Brunch? I no longer remember. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I can’t remember when I had my first meal because I was jumping from one task to another. Half cup of rice, some slivers of bacon, egg and sauteed kangkong. It’s kangkong all the way down because my digestive system needs fiber.
I had lunch at around 3 pm. I can’t remember if I had dinner. Did I? Was too busy messaging people all at the same time that I lost track of who am I talking to about what. Sometimes, I’m in danger of typing in the wrong chatbox about something another person shouldn’t know about. Like the chatboxes of my sources on WhatsApp are dangerously close to each other. This kind of mistake is fatal, which happened to me when I mixed up my brother with J a month ago or so on FB Messenger. š¤¦š»āāļø
I was surprised that that the day was already gone when I finished uploading my story at past 5 pm. My brain was also shutting down so I gave up any pretense of sending emails and trying to network with people.
This curtain in progress is mine, hooman. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
My obnoxious cat, Sushi, couldn’t care less about her human’s frenetic day. She would sit on anything that I am working on, including this curtain that I’m finishing. She slept on it, crumpling it further.
Tomorrow I have a dentist appointment and parking at my dentist is next to zero. So Grab it is. But just the thought of waiting for my ride is enough to make me wilt. Climate change is real, people. I don’t remember being this hot when I was growing up. I never heard of anyone dying of heatstroke when I was a kid and we were always outside in the grassland with my friends everyday, all summer vacation. I was so brown for playing outside all day. These days, I couldn’t even stand being in my old room in my mom’s house because it was like burning in hell. It didn’t have AC because it has always been cool there. Not anymore. Everyone now convenes in my mom’s side of the house (in her self-contained unit/studio) where she has a 2.5 hp split-type AC. I never bothered to have my old room fitted with AC because I don’t live there anymore. I haven’t even slept in there the last two years.
My cats are now convening in my room because it’s cool here.
Ever since I was a child, my hands were always busy doing something creative. I was a sickly child (darn you, asthma!) so there were long stretches of days being confined in our house and I had to find ways of amusing myself. I created villages out of cardboard and paper. I made paper dolls. I made notepads out of my parents’ scratch white papers. I picked out clean white pages of old notebooks and sewed the spines together to create new notebooks. I made watercolor paintings; they were not good but it helped me express myself. I remember when I was in 5th Grade that I was crocheting non-stop and was making crocheted pen holders that you can wear around your neck like a necklace. In those days, we often lost our pens and it’s annoying if we lose that one pen that writes perfectly. I sold those to my classmates and it did offset the cost of yarn.
In high school, I continued to draw but I concentrated on pencils. I copied the paintings from our art encyclopedia at home and I remember my favorite artist then was Rembrandt. Then I moved on to album cover art and my first one was the art on Guns N’ Roses’ album Use Your Illusion because it was one of the albums I and my guy friends were listening to back in 1993 (yes, I was one of the boys and that’s how I ended up forming a band right out of college with my high school classmates, but that’s for another blog entry).
One summer, my cousin who was taking up Fine Arts at UST taught me how to use graphite pencils properly, like how to shave the graphite to produce the powder to paint and blend the different grades. Later, I somehow lost interest in it so I concentrated on watercolors. I was happy with it even though I’m not good at it. I was always envious of people who were brilliant in drawing and painting. I remember I became friends with one boy (our common friend was a classmate) over art when I was 15 years old and was in Cebu competing in a national science contest for my research on fungi. He was really good at it but he didn’t pursue a career in the arts and instead ended up as a lawyer (yes, we’re still friends).
I was also into photography. In high school, I didn’t know the technical aspects of photography but I was always with a camera back then. I had so many photos of high school scenes that ended up in our year book. In college, I took up photography because I thought I wanted to be a photojournalist. Those were the days when we still used film so we were taught how to process our films and develop our photos in different formats. We used black and white films then (my favorite brand was Agfa) so we could concentrate on composition and exposure. I had to be judicious with the use of one film roll because black and white films were hard to purchase and chemicals for dark room processing weren’t cheap. So I had to remember which aperture and shutter speed to use under certain light conditions–I had to memorize all those combinations because light is tricky and it shifts. I could not rely on guesswork because I only had 24 shots or 36 shots at most.
I remember for action photography, I had to use my dog Kuting as my subject because I didn’t want to hang on trees to capture speeding cars. I wanted to have my own dark room then because I was so enamored of the entire process. My mom bought a Canon EOS Rebel II with 35-80 mm lens and 80-200mm lens because she knew I would be taking up photography. I went everywhere with that camera. Because of my keen interest in photography, my geologist uncle gave me his Nikon FM2 which he used in Antartica. That manual SLR is built like a tank and since it’s all manual, it does not have electronics that could freeze and malfunction. I also owned a Holga lomo camera just because. All of these babies were left in our old house and I wasn’t able to come back for them right after we moved to this apartment because the priority then was to remove ourselves from there as soon as possible. When I was able to sneak back into that house, all my cameras were gone. I think the girls’ dad took them with him to display in their museum of a house in their province (they’re hoarders).
When I became a field reporter, I always had a digital camera in my bag because you’ll never know what could happen. Which proved to be very true in my career. One of my incidental photos ended up on the front page of the newspaper I used to work for before. It occupied half of the front page that accompanied my big story the following day after I took the photo.
My first digital camera was an Olympus but I wasn’t happy with its color rendering. I moved on to a Fujifilm F30, which I loved to bits because of its film simulation settings and low light capability. Since owning that nifty camera, I’ve always bought Fujifilms. I didn’t invest in a DSLR because having owned an SLR that I lugged everywhere I went, I knew it was impractical for me to carry regularly with my laptop and go chasing sources down the hallways for interviews. I still have the Fujifilm XQ1 that I still use in my travels because an SLR is really impractical and cumbersome. A good compromise is a mirrorless camera (like any of the Fujifilm X series) that I can easily shove in my bag. A good focal length would be 35-55mm but it still looks too touristy–because I use my digicam mainly for travel–so the perfect lens would be a pancake lens…
But I digress…
I had/have so many creative outlets but I can’t say I’m brilliant in any of them. That’s why Iām envious of creative and talented people because they have a knack for it while I struggle to produce anything passable. I admire them and I hope that none of those creative people I’ve met lose their talent because they got sidelined (just like that artist-lawyer friend of mine and J).
Taken during my first Angono boat ridewith J about two years ago. Photo by CallMeCreation.com
I went to Wilcon Home Depot after work to buy tiles, tile adhesive, and grout. I am finally biting the bullet and I’m going to have the bathroom floor re-tiled.
Why did it take me this long (almost 3 years)? Because having the bathroom re-tiled means four days of unusable bathroom (for showering) and that would piss off J so much and I would not hear the end of his complaints. Now that he’s no longer here, I can finally do this. I can devote more time to supervising the work since I have more free time now. When we were still together, 70% of my time was devoted to J, attending to his needs, especially when he was still in AirBnBs: driving back and forth, eating out, running errands for him/with him, doing chores, and keeping him company until dawn. When I’m not yet in his condo, he would be asking, “When/what time are you coming over?”
When he was here in the apartment, I had to make sure the disturbance to him was minimal. Any home repairs or improvement must be worked around his schedule.
That’s why when he suggested to have a sink and have another exhaust fan installed in the bathroom, I couldn’t commit because that also entails tile change. I needed to figure out the logistics and was determining whether my EQ can take the complaints that will surely come my way because he would not be able to shower in the bathroom for four days or do number 1 and 2 uncomfortably. The noise–the hammering to chip away the tiles–would also drive him mad. I was running the numbers in my head if I can afford to make him stay in a hotel while the bathroom is being fixed.
But then there were more immediate things that needed my attention like fixing the car. Then I had to drive him to where he wanted to go whenever he was having cabin fever. Before Covid, I also needed to be in the field for work while I ferry him to his meetings. Then every weekend we always had to do something or go somewhere.
I never came around to tackling the bathroom.
So now as part of my loving myself program, I’m going to indulge in a better bathroom, even if this apartment is not mine/I don’t have equity in it. If I can only fit a Japanese soaking tub in there, I would. I don’t like the tub in my mom’s house, the western style tub that wastes too much water. The hotels or ryokan I pick for my travels in Japan had to be 1) within walking distance of a train station or 2) have an in-house onsen or a deep soaking tub.
Bette Midler’s soaking tub. Photo by Architectural Digest.
So once I start building my cottage, I’m definitely going to install a very good water heater and a Japanese soaking tub.
This blog entry looks like it’s just a story about a bathroom. But it’s more of an example of how I accommodated J in my life. That he was a huge chunk of my life for 2.5 years.
