A Rather Blustery Day

Frank the typhoon in the pacific was looking for a good place for a landfall for the weekend and with a little help from the monsoons, they gave him directions to pay my hometown a stormy visit, and frank was very angry when he did. He messed up my hometown that he was close to sinking everything over the weekend.

My hometown is a wreck because of the typhoon, and a lot of people here need help very badly, and I wont be surprised if some chinaman from sichuan would donate one chinese penny for our disasater, in return for one of our own penny I donated for their sichuan earthquake two weeks ago to make it even.

Frank was all over the news too, he took last week’s top airtime spot from this news anchor in the news who got kidnapped by some rebels and was later released after his fellow news anchor turned senator claimed to have helped her out to grab airtime scenes for herself too before she runs for president two years later, it was already getting dull. If frank came here for a reason, he must have lost his sense of direction because these rebels' hideout he needs to flush out is lying further down south from here, but the rebels must have enough ransom money to refortify it anyway.

There wasn’t much to do at work over the stormy weekend, the streets were flooded with mud water that nobody was walking to anywhere at all, I decided to go see some movie to help me kill time, I didn't mind wading through mud water though, you don't get the streets here looking like rivers often. I watched this second narnia movie which I wasn’t too keen to because I hadn’t seen the first one, there wasn’t anything else good to see anyway but it was kind of fine. They had mythological and fairytale freaks in the movie who were up against medieval troops that had thick spanish accent complete with conquistadoric armors, you could tell that they were spanish from the start, they were supposed to be pirates invading the freak kingdom and they could have definitely been from magellan’s fleet because you’d always wonder what happened to his other three ships that never made it back to spain, and they weren’t pushovers too wherever they landed.

And the mythological and fairytale freaks in the movie were called narnians that sounded close to narranians, which was what my high school section was collectively known, probably after what an odd, hardy and uprising bunch we were. But what was hilarious about the title was that narnia for me almost sounded like hernia, and that what’s exactly came to my mind after seeing how the satyrs walked around in the movie like they had one.

Rocking Sichuan

If you want to know one pathetic truth about me, its that I’m a really big sucker for flowers, I like picking and buying the good looking ones and getting them altogether on a goddam bouquet, its not that I like flowers for myself but during past unfortunate events that I fell in love with a girl, I have this intuition of sending her flowers because I’m just one hell of a hopeless romantic that I’m stuck with this idea that girls like getting flowers.

I was flying back to manila from hong kong and I always made it a habit to go see their flower market before I leave the place, I am not seeing anybody but its one of the places where I think they had the best flowers.

There’s this bundle of roses I found there which were very pretty, it was pink and it turned dark purple into its petal edges, I wanted to buy it though I didn’t have anybody to give it to, perhaps to that cute girl who frequents ariel’s internet café but what the hell. I was staring at that bundle long enough that I almost pulled it out and the florist even asked me in mandarin if I wanted it.

I left the place and took the subway back, and the past few days that I was taking the subway I could notice that there are a lot of these donation boxes scattered around the place for the earthquake disaster in sichuan a month ago, they almost had one in every mcdonalds and every corner you could just turn to. Because a month ago there was this one hell of a earthquake that rocked sichuan province in china back to the ming dynasty, the news reported that the earthquake blew up the richter scale but maybe because of the suppression of the press in red china I didn’t get to see much pictures of the earthquake devastation in the news back home, all they gave you were numbers like millions worth of property lost and ten thousands of chinamen getting killed in the earthshake, and seeing numbers didn’t struck your sentiments rather than seeing real pictures of a crushed townscape along with its humanity. But in hong kong there were always pictures at their late night news and their morning papers and posters everywhere that the disaster surprised me too soon already.

I even tried giving a donation two days ago, I was walking and I passed by this shrine where some chinamen were praying to their oriental side of heaven, there was a big steel sichuan donation box beside the shrine that caught my attention, I had one penny from my country’s currency and decided to drop it inside, they couldn’t buy anything worthwhile with it anyway but I was making some sort of a wishful thought with my penny to them like how losers drop coins to wells and fountains. I struck a pose during the moment when I was about to drop my coin and took a picture of it with my mobile phone.

When I dropped my coin, it hit the bottom of the steel donation box with a loud resounding ‘TONGGG’ and I found out that the goddam donation box was empty, and the sound of my coin was awfully loud because of the silence in the shrine that everybody who was praying turned to me and saw me with legs apart holding my mobile phone and making that glorious dropping-coin pose, all those chinamen could have done was clap for me, they didn't but nonetheless it was embarrassing, I smiled back anyway. I should have dropped my coin someplace else like in the noisy subways.

I did get the flowers, but hell I will just have to let them rot at my desk.

Just Like Manny

I was only home for three weekends but I had to take this flight to hong kong on saturday so I had to fly back to manila again last friday, my flight to manila was around seven in the morning and I was already up around four yet the seat I got in the plane was at the farthest rows at the back, and when they started handing out newspapers up front, everybody ahead of me was so eager to read then that none of the papers ever made it to my seat. I felt like sleeping anyway, it was contagious from both the sleeping passengers beside me and I think I only had three hours of sleep myself the night before too.

I was going to stay for a night in manila because I had some things to do. First I had to do some laundry at my hotel because the jacket I brought along was filthy dirty, I was watching the weather at the news back home before I left and it said it was raining hard in hong kong and I just grabbed one of my jackets in a hurry without seeing that it looked like somebody used it to wipe his car clean. Then next I had to get some eye drops because when I get to hong kong my eyes turns blood red after a day or so, it always happens and it will give you the creeps, and its like the same way I get mouth sores whenever I get to bangkok. Sometimes I feel it’s the bird flu trying to get to my system through my eyes.

One of the persons I would like to meet over at hong kong now is this guy chris I got to know at the start of the year. He’s from hong kong, he works there and sells gundam model kits as a part time job, and eversince I revived my old hobby of gundam models last december, he’s been responsible for the armada of gundam models crawling up my desk. I don’t know how he looks though, we do business only in emails but what is particularly great about him is that he doesn’t charge much for shipping a package to me, unlike other internet merchants that would charge a lot, and when I tried complaining about it they would tell me that their shipment costs is not just the price on the stamps I see in the package. Chris would always end up his emails to me by saying cheers lib like he’s holding up to toast a mug of beer to me or something across the screen, my brother told me that it’s a british remark. I wonder if chris does like to get beers after work but in a fit of rush I left the copy of his address back home.

On my way to hong kong saturday I had breakfast up at the plane and slept all the way over the red china sea until touchdown, the weather was spectacularly bad from my window and they even called it a black rainstorm at the airport, it sounded like it was raining more than just cats and dogs and it made you feel the weather just had your day on a bad start. I made my way out from the tube of the plane when I saw this guy who used to be the president of my country whom everybody back home got used to call by his initials FVR, he ran for office years ago when I was still 12 but yet he still looked pretty fit for somebody who’s almost 80. He was chewing on his unlit cigar because they probably cant have anybody smoking around the airport, the same way I would have chewed on my plastic cup because they don't serve beer at the plane at eight in the morning, I came up to him and tried to say something and when he saw me he looked stern and said something like ‘get your chest out and stomach in son’ he then gave me a thumbs up sign and a smile and continued saying ‘that’s it, just like manny pacqxxxx’.

I hate this presumption that everybody from my third world country has this arrogant pugilist for a hero.