Simply Irresistible

A few days ago, Nissa brought home a piece of drinking glass with embossed design of Coca Cola and the cartoon was from McDonald’s. I got curious  so I asked her where she got it.  It’s the recent promo of McDonald’s.  They come in colors of lime, purple, pink, charcoal, blue and green. She has completed all six colors and intends to buy more.  Some sort of collection, she  said. You can only eat so much value meals in a day or two. All she did was to ask her officemates to buy them for her. And they are not just ordinary glassware, they are Luminarc. Luminarc products are a little expensive but McDonald’s lets you buy them at P25.00 each.  I love the lime color.

They’re Just….Early Morning Thoughts

Just got caught with early morning nostalgia. Silly, you might say, but this is the time of day when everything seems so vivid and alive.

Four am.  It’s never for want of trying to sleep at least until the break of dawn, my eyes simply would not cooperate.  I’m usually wide awake  around this time, when everything you can hear outside is a pregnant silence.  My mind travels back to so many things and it is simply full of  ideas that I can’t verbalize nor even write about.  A hot cup of coffee somehow would fill the void but it is a luxury for me now, at least while I am on chemotherapy.   Hmm, I was clearly tempted so I tried a sip.  And here comes the proverbial question, “is it me or is it the coffee?”. There’s nothing there,  the taste was just bland.  I was thinking, I could do without it after all.

The past days, I had this adrenalin rush to do an inventory of the books we have saved during the flood.  I am looking for one particular volume entitled Painting Colors, a hard bound copy which I bought at Powerbooks in Megamall five years ago when we had the repainting of the house.  We are in the thick of renovating it and having painting jobs done.  From the shelves which weren’t touched by flood waters, I could see twenty five volumes of Nissa’s Charmed, a complete set of Josef’s Harry Potter series, Jeffrey Archer’s paperbacks, Paulo Coelho’s books, several Shopaholic series by Sophie Kinsella , one or two books of Robin Cook, Slumdog Millionaire, Atonement, Time Traveler’s Wife, and some books by Cecilia Ahern. Compared to almost a thousand volumes we had before, these are just minimal.  It’s good we were able to save the Lexicon which hubby bought some years ago. All the volumes I had at my night table, including our family Bible and my favorite garden books are all gone. Who would think that flood waters would reach as high as four feet inside our bedroom and as  deep as seven feet in our sala, I’ll never know.  Our neighbor said that in all the thirty five years they’ve been living here, this is the first time that it happened.  Gosh, when I think of the two volumes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez‘  Love in the Time of Cholera and  One Hundred Years of  Solitude,  I simply shake my head.  They were gifts from Nissa and I haven’t  even finished reading the former.  It’s so sad really, I’ve said time and again that books are lifetime companions and I simply could not live without them.

I couldn’t bring myself to see our three Thomasian Yearbooks all soiled and smelling like crazy. Josef’s copy was the most damaged.  You could always think and rethink of memories until you bleed  but there are certain things that your heart holds but your mind wants to see, hard evidences of what you have aspired for through the years.

Ramblings

I remember an old friend who used to say, “The journey to life is an endless struggle on  perilous paths of treacherous stones and storms”. For one so young he surely looked at the world with open eyes and between the two of us, I was more of the dreamer than he was.  I had this penchant for collecting quotes from almost every book that comes into my hands,  filling up three full notebook of quotations my entire college life. He was really a big influence to me -  appreciating  good poetry, good books and  yes, quotes that somehow played a big chunk of what I called my “sentimental” moments.

“Live the dream”, he would  say. I do. I did. and I like to think that somehow, in between wakefulness and dreamland, life was real. Why am I remembering?  Why the sudden recall?  Or is this one of those moments that makes  one wander far beyond, going far off to a place of childhood dreams?  I really don’t know.  I just saw the place where we used to walk and talk, and dream about big things that only the young would think of  and I suddenly pictured his smiling face, creating a sense of sudden longing. Memories sometimes have that power to make one lonely and alone.

I would have liked to share that I am going through a phase in my life full of so much pain. But I can hear his voice saying,  “Life is never perfect”. And he would understand.  And I would tell him that I am brave enough to face it all.

Soo Kee

Meet the new member of our family. In Japanese, Suki means beloved but Nissa decided to spell it Soo Kee for variation.  Haha, anyway, she has been with us for the past three days, a cute, lovable and playful Chihuahua puppy given  as a gift by my brother-n-law.  Gosh, our other dog, Boo feels probably so insecure because this puppy is in and out of the house as if she’s the Queen here. 

Nissa and Josef are crazy about her and even my mom who has just arrived from the province is so thrilled to hold her.  She is so cuddly and well-behaved.I love how her tail curls on the side and how her ears are in full attention when she gets to hear passing children in our street.

I Miss Malling

Yesterday was the first time I ventured out since I had my 4th chemo last October 27.  I’ve always been wary of crowds since my medical oncologist has strict instructions for me to stay put while I am still undergoing chemotherapy. I know, I know, it’s quite hard to do it but I am also afraid of the consequences if my immune system would be affected by the pollution outside.  One would think a cancer patient is like a fragile baby always sheltered from the storm and from the grind of daily living.  I even have to be content with attending Sunday masses on television.  There are several things I really have to give up, at least for a while.

Going to the malls is one such activity that everybody takes for granted. One could enjoy doing just that at any time of the day, at any day of the week or simply just passing a few hours doing nothing but sit on those comfy benches provided by the malls, as they say, just watching the world go by. It is now a novelty for me though, because I haven’t stepped inside a mall for quite sometime now, until yesterday when I was forced to accompany the hubby to the Handyman store at Metro East Mall.  We have to buy and select drawer guides, cabinet knobs, paints and paint accessories for our house renovation and he made sure that I have a  say in the colors that we have to apply.  I was in a quandary in what to buy,the drawer pulls and knobs come in varying sizes and colors. They look simply irresistible.  I was visibly shocked though with the staggering costs of construction materials.  Fifteen years ago, when we had our house constructed, I had a first hand experience on how to build on a budget.  They have gone triple in the last fifteen years.

We finally selected Davies’ Bio-Fresh paints.  I am just quoting their brochures, Davies’ Bio-Fresh is a 100% acrylic odour-less and anti-bacterial latex paint. It emits less pollutant in the air and has no unpleasant smell which normally comes with ordinary paints.  And its anti-bacterial/anti-fungal formulation helps inhibits the growth of disease causing bacteria such as E. coli. Great and I love the soft sheen on the walls.  We decided on True Blue color for the bedrooms, Almost Peach for the rest of the house,  Ivory Satin for the ceiling and  tomato red for our accent wall.  The hubby decided to have the cabinet doors done in sliding glass.  Gosh, we are on a budget so why is he splurging on mirror sliding glass doors? I know, it is a space enlarger but could we afford it? The cost of a pair would paint the whole house, even our perimeter fence.

I really miss malling, I would have loved to linger and take a look at the Christmas lights and decors  hanging in every corner of the store but I was afraid to get exposed to so many people around. Christmas is definitely in the air.

Suha, Lukban, Grapefruit, Pomelo

Call it  by any other name but it is still the same.  We know it locally as lukban, at least in our Pangasinan dialect. And Dad has planted about one or two grapefruit trees which are now bearing fruits.  The flowers, when they bloom smell just as sweet as oranges.

Since I was diagnosed with the big C (my friend doesn’t want to call it this way since you can fight and conquer it), I have this penchant for eating citrus fruits like guyabano or sour sop aside of course from the ever reliable apples.  There was a study made on guyabano and it was found out that it is ten thousand  times more powerful in fighting cancer than chemotherapy. And unlike chemotherapy, it does not kill the good cells in your body.  Lately though, I’ve been enamored with this sweet, delicious treat, the pomelo.  We found a good, reliable fruit vendor in our neighborhood and she sells them for about a hundred pesos a kilo. Sometimes, one pomelo  weighs more than a kilo but it is all worth it.  This variety has just that right degree of juiciness, tart and the skin is so thin and the plumb pulp bits taste heavenly.  It’s seedless too. I’ve learned to peel it,   sectioning  and getting the meat intact from the rind with bare hands and the process is a joy in itself.  I learned from my lola from way, way back that you should not use a knife in peeling pomelo so it won’t taste bitter.  Young as I was, I believed her of course.

The health benefits of grapefruits are too many to be overlooked.  Its rind contains many anti-cancer agents that help fight certain diseases  It is a food rich in flavonoids which can inhibit the activation of carcinogen.

Our Brush With Typhoon Ondoy

September 28, 2009

I would not really know how to begin because this story is another milestone not only in my family’s life but also in the lives of our neighbors, our community and our own town, Cainta, Rizal.

In all of my fifty two years of existence, this is the first time that I encountered such an experience.  For the last two days, I felt that the world stopped all of a sudden.  Have you ever imagined that kind of helpless feeling and just cry your heart out in frustration?  When all you can  do is pray and hold on to each other because you are not sure if you’ll still see each other tomorrow or the following day or the next?  This happened to us at the height of typhoon Ondoy.

September 26, 2009. Saturday was supposed to be another family day for us.  Hubby and my daughter left early to do our weekend marketing. They arrived home at around 8am and we spent another hour of storing the food that they bought.  Hubby and I were scheduled to go to Sto. Domingo Church in QC upon our friend Lovell’s invitation to visit Mama Mary at her Shrine (La Naval) before they prepare her for the procession on October 11.  Although it has been raining cats and dogs the previous night, the Saturday downpour left us unaware that flood waters could reach our place in a few hours.  We’ve been staying in this place for the last fifteen years and even at the heaviest downpour, rain waters only reach our gate.  There was something unusual at the speed of water coming in so we spent the next two hours trying to save most of our possessions from being drenched and destroyed.

Nobody thought of having lunch although my daughter prepared one.  At around 1pm, flood waters inside the house  reached my waist so I told hubby that we should vacate the place. I was the first one to leave guided by my son Josef carrying a change of clothes for each one of us, cellphones which come in handy in times of disasters like this. We sought refuge at my neighbor’s house across the street.  The water outside was up to my neck when we crossed the street and I only realized I was not wearing any slippers.   My son painstakingly carried the contents of our freezer on his shoulder thinking  that we would not have enough food if the flood goes for long.  They stayed for another hour knocking on our other neighbors’ doors and helping them into safety.  We were five families who stayed in that place for about three days, helping and comforting each other, sharing the meager food that we had and trying to contact the outside world for help.

When you are tense and stressed, sleep wouldn’t come that easy.  I remember our neighbor Jomarie who went back to their place just to retrieve the favorite doll of his 3-year old daughter.  We thought he was carried away by the raging waters because he was not answering our shouts.  According to his wife, that doll that he saved was his daughter’s security blanket and that she could not sleep at night without it.  The love of a father to his child.  Silent tears were flowing freely when I learned about it.

We might have lost most of our material possessions but we gained extended families in our neighbors who went through the same ordeal with us.  I am so thankful that my own family is complete.  It might take sometime for us to have our normal lives back . It is an experience I will never forget.

The brush with typhoon Ondoy taught me many things.  Your faith in God should never waver in times like this, it’s the time that you need Him most.  It taught me that one could live simply from day to day, without worrying about what tomorrow brings.  You are just thankful that you are given another day to survive.  Thank you Lord for keeping us all safe.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Life is a dance. Sometimes, it is a harmonious fluid movement. We are in sync with the music, utterly attuned to the dance steps, well synchronized with the motion – two steps forward, one step back. Others may lead and others may follow. It is a mad dash to a world of perfect twists and turns, but the journey is not one long road to success and happiness. One wrong move, one wrong turn, one missed step would spell disaster.

We are constantly seeking perfection and excellence in everything we do but there is really nothing perfect in this world that we live in. Life is a meaningless pursuit without challenge. They say that the journeys walked in solitude are always the most remembered. There is something we always learn along the uneven pathways and the most profound events in our lives do not end with the six o-clock news and the setting sun.

Sometimes, I am amused by other people’s reaction upon learning that I have colon cancer and their usual question is “Are you really undergoing chemotherapy? You are looking good“. “Thank you“, I say. My big question is, how should one act and how should one look if you are diagnosed with this kind of ailment? True, it is a life-changing situation but I never think of it as a major setback. I believe that God won’t give us problems that we can’t bear. The agonizing moments that I have endured during the last few months have drawn me closer to God. God has been profoundly real to me, opening my eyes to the realization that not everyone are privileged to endure even just a tiny prick from what He suffered on the cross. Martin Luther King aptly put it this way, “beneath and above the shifting sands of time, the uncertainties that darken our days, and the vicissitudes that cloud our nights is a wise and loving God“.

Life is a dance, and when we falter in our steps, God is there to do the rest.

September 22

Four am -
It’s a bit early you think
But the gentle wind
Keeps the curtains dancing
through my open window
Sending shivers
Where are you?
Or were you just a dream
After all?

I cried myself  to sleep last night
Silly, you might say,
But then, crying is one such necessity
That I need to do
Cleansing my soul
You are in my thoughts for now
And I smile despite the tears
Memories are reborn.

Goodbye Dad, I miss you!

Countdown to 2010 – It’s A Noynoy-Mar Tandem

It’s final – Sen. Mar Roxas has accepted the vice-presidential bid under the Liberal Party in a simple ceremony held at Club Filipino a few hours ago.  It started with a prayer led by Fr. Tito Caluag of Ateneo.  I love the way Noynoy made his introduction of Mar in a precise, clear and sometimes witty speech delivery. He also acknowledged the presence of his sister Viel who was there to give him her moral support and he jokingly said that, “lahat ng mga kapatid ko tahimik maliban lang dun sa bunso, referring of course to his youngest sister Kris Aquino.

Mar Roxas was in yellow T-shirt, the proverbial color of Tita Cory.  The crowd were chanting “Noynoy, Mar“ even before Mar started his acceptance speech. “Salamat Noynoy sa tiwalang ipinagkaloob mo sa akin“.  What a short but powerful acceptance speech.  He said that they are after a government that puts the people’s interest first. And it is about a collective search for change.

“Mga kababayan, taos-puso ko pong tinatanggap ang maging katambal ni Noynoy Aquino”.

“But this fight is not just about Noynoy and me. Tungkol ito sa matuwid laban sa baluktot. Tungkol ito sa tapat laban sa tiwali. Tungkol ito sa tama laban sa mali.”

“We are up against forces who will fight tooth and nail, fair and unfair, legal and illegal, against us. Sa kanila,  tuloy ang ligaya; sa atin naman, tuloy ang laban”.

“Kailangan nating isulong ang bandila ni Noy at ng reporma. Mahirap ang laban na ito, pero nasa kamay natin ang ating kapalaran”.

He urged the public not to be complacent since this is a tough battle to face.  Noynoy announced his presidential bid last Sept. 09, 2009.