Kitty Litter

Stop the presses! Just when I was pulling through two difficult weeks, I heard the kind of story that helped bring my perspective back.

Or so I think.

All I know is that I think I want hardship...the kind in the story below.

A very wealthy friend of my mom's gleefully told her the story of one of her nieces. The family lives in Ayala Alabang, so when the niece applied for a job at a call center, well, let's just say the interviewer was taken aback. Seems she wanted the job to be with her friends.

He told the girl, "I'm not sure this is a good idea for you. You live in Ayala Alabang and you must enjoy a certain standard of living, so there might be problems with your commitment to work. I must point out that a lot of our employees aren't very well off, and I don't know if you can relate to them as I doubt you've known, er, hardship."

The girl brightly responded, "Oh, I know hardship! And I can deal with it. I drive a 7 year old Toyota Corona, you know, and that's really hard."

You know I'm not making this up because I bet you have an even funnier story about this kind of perspective.

Labels: funny stories

Slumbook Entry: Who Is Your Crush (or, To All The Men I’ve Loved Before)

Haven’t done a “slumbook” entry in some time, so here’s a funny one: “Who is your crush?”

If you think I’m going to talk about real men here, no way! That wouldn’t be fun, and I might get sued by the exes I’ve got on friendly terms already. (And that’s a nice topic for another entry: why some people cannot even utter their exes’ names without a twitch, and why some people can keep them on good terms. Hmmm.)

Instead, let’s talk about celebrities who have caught my fancy one way or another over the years. Someone once described the celebrity crush as being like a teenaged girl’s training bra for relationships: you grow into it, and it gets you ready for the real thing. In that case, boy was I ever unprepared for the real world.

I hope you have your asthma inhaler because this is embarrassing for me, and hilarious for those friends who know about it.

When I was growing up, there were plenty of men to choose from on TV, and my choices included Erik Estrada of “CHiPS,” the men on the soaps “Dynasty” and “Falcon Crest,” particularly Lorenzo Lamas; David Hasselhoff of “Knight Rider”; and Pierce Brosnan of “Remington Steele.” I swooned over Luke in “Star Wars” too. The eyes had it; if deep-set eyes were paired with a husky voice, I was gone. Colonial mentality rules; at the age of nine, I’d determined that I wanted to marry a foreign guy. (Who’d’ve thought I’d wind up with a man who looked foreign, all right…albeit Korean?)

I was the kind of girl who went for what she wanted, regardless of the consequences. In 1985, I decided I wanted Robby Rosa, member of Menudo and lead singer. He personified the type which would become the kind of male guaranteed to send my ovaries into an uproar: tall, lean (and somewhat rugged), deep-set eyes and thick eyebrows, and the kind of voice that made me want to marry him at “hello.” So I pestered my mother, who had showbiz connections, into pulling a few strings, and I got to meet him several times, thanks to her ingenuity. I have pictures cuddling up to him, and even one of him kissing me, this time thanks to his friend Ricky Martin. In short, I lived the teenaged girl’s fantasy of meeting the idol and getting up close and personal.

But such easy success turned my head and set my standards a bit high. I decided I wanted a guy who was a celebrity, not understanding that it was just a case of me wanting eye candy on my arm and not a real person.

I went through a brief flirtation with local celebrities (not literally) after Menudo’s star sank. I watched shows like “Triple Treat” because of the singer Keno, and “Palibhasa Lalake” (ugh) because of Richard Gomez, and silly movies like “Huwag Mong Buhayin ang Bangkay” for Jestoni Alarcon, and “Pik Pak Boom” for the celebrity cast. And if you think it didn’t cause me physical pain to write that, you are dead wrong.

But in my senior year in high school, I set my sights on Benjie Paras, a calculated move, as he was still a basketball rookie and had all his hair. I could get into his school, the state university, and I could figure out how to meet him. Or so I thought.

I worked briefly for a basketball fan magazine in order to meet him, and sent him my sexiest photo in my mermaid-like sagala outfit. Unfortunately all I got was a bunch of panting phone calls from his driver, who apparently was in the habit of opening his mail.

Certainly I got to know Benjie on a “hi, hello, um I forgot your name but hi anyway” basis, but no further. The last I ever saw of him in UP was on the way to my Math I finals. I ran into him on the stairs and he shushed me when I asked why he was taking the Math I finals when he was already on his sixth year of school.

Time to turn my sights back on foreigners, I decided. No particular member of the Brat Pack of the 80s interested me, but as a group I liked them.

Who is my type today? The basics have remained constant, although my standards have become more flexible. For one, after seeing the “Harry Potter” movies, I told Polar Bearball that he would have to move over and let someone else father my children, as I wanted a son who looked like Daniel Radcliffe (“Harry”).

Who else do I fixate on? David Caruso on CSI: Miami. Sean Connery. Nicholas Brendon and Anthony Stewart Head of “Buffy: The Vampire Slayer.” Will Smith. Simon on “American Idol.” And in response to the obvious question, yes, I am sick. All foreigners? Dunno why; the locals aren’t too much to my liking these days, and I’m sure they don’t care.

But they all pale in comparison to the celebrity crush I have on Oded Fehr. When I saw “The Mummy” with Polar Bearball, I flipped over him. He played the dark, mysterious Ardeth Bay, descendant of the Medjai. Those eyes! Those lips! The hair! That, that…voice! Those romance-slash-bodice-ripper-novel looks!

(Weird aside: I dreamt of him last week. I was supposed to be at some movie set with Goldie Gold, my best friend, and I told him, “You look different with your clothes on.” Not that I’ve ever seen him naked. But if anyone feels like putting him in my Christmas gift pile, Gawd bless you and thank you!)

I have an unfortunate tendency to follow the careers of those I was a fan of, and the results are mostly disappointing. Many of them have wound up selling questionable products on infomercials.

But I saw that Oded Fehr’s career has picked up; he’s playing lead on the UC: Undercover show on Star World. At first, I was unhappy that he’d cut his hair short. But later, I found myself eagerly awaiting the show. I watch it regularly, although if you make the mistake of asking me what the plotline is, you won’t get anything beyond “God I love his leather jacket! I wonder what cologne he wears?” If the guy ran a phone sex line, I’d bankrupt myself calling him up; I bet hearing “Please state your name,” would sound like “You have lovely skin; I’d like to taste it,” coming from him. Oooh.

Excuse me. I think I better stop talking about the guy before I start turning this into a porn entry.

Someone once told me that at “my age” I shouldn’t have crushes anymore. And why not? Every reputable sex expert will tell you that there’s nothing wrong with that. I encourage Polar Bearball’s crushes on celebrities because I know there’s no chance that he’ll actually try to cart off the entire Viva Hot Babe squad; for one, he hates having to make conversation with bimbos. Ogling celebrities allows me to indulge in fantasy, and to appreciate male beauty. My Polar Bearball is man enough for me, sure, but there’s a certain thrill to looking at what you know you can’t have, except in dreams. So long as I know where to draw the line, no problem there.

Now it’s time for me to get back to the show I don’t actually watch, but often see. Tee hee.

Labels: celebrity crushes, funny stories

Everyone thinks that horror is defined by what goes bump in the night. Believe me, I often nab my Intro to Literature students on this one. But since I swore this would be a cheerier, happier blog (and since my own blog pet—see sidebar—says I need to lighten up) here are a few versions of Helloween (spelling deliberate) for those in need of a laugh.

In my first year of teaching, I became close to an Engineering block I handled, and the kids there organized a “ghost hunt” on campus. Given all the stories of ghosts on UP campus, we were eager to see the requisite headless men, white ladies, floating protoplasm, and sundry other supernatural beings. But Botch, (and yes, that is his name and that is how it is spelled) along with Clint, the class president, decided to spice things up a bit. They organized small-group tours of “severely haunted” areas on campus. Groups of four or five would go in and come out laughing nervously.

When it was my turn, I was accompanied by two girls and three members of the UP men’s basketball team who were my students. Let’s refer to them as Pretty Boy, Big Boy, and Future PBA Star Boy. We ascended the dark stairs leading to the fourth floor of Palma Hall. Ambient noises made us jump and shudder every now and then. But Big Boy kept cracking nervous jokes about jumping off the ledges next to us. Strangely, this was comforting, at least until we reached the fourth (and top) floor. We passed one room from which we could hear unearthly whispering.

“What was that?” Pretty Boy quivered, and pointed at one door.

Future PBA Star Boy, the bravest of the lot, said, ”Wait. I’ll find out.” He slowly approached the door, and the closer he got, the less whispering we heard. As he was about to push the door open, it suddenly creaked on its hinges.

The trio screeched, and fled down the stairs. We followed quickly, squealing a little, and I timed Future PBA Star Boy’s descent from the fourth floor to the ground floor. Eight seconds. No wonder was known as the fast break specialist in the UAAP during his time.

I heard someone coming up behind us, and, resigned to my fate, faced the source of the noise. It was Botch, giggling like a girl. Turns out Clint had planted him there for the express purpose of scaring those who walked by.

Labels: funny stories, halloween

I’m sleepy as I type this. But, shameless online exhibitionist that I am, I continue writing in hopes that someone will find what I write to be funny. In addition to that compulsion, I am trying to stave off sleep. Officially, it’s because I want to finish work on the various articles I’m editing for Wedding Essentials (plugging!) so that I can turn my attention to the huge pile of student papers I have to burn…er, check by Friday this week. I’m betting it’ll take me up to one hour before the “deadliest deadline” to finish that, given my propensity for Hearts, chow, scratch-the-cat’s-belly, and myriad other breaks I give myself on a regular (say five minute) basis. The actual deadline passed a week ago, by the way, and I am astounded by my own nerve. Used to be, I submitted everything on time. Not anymore. Who cares when the older faculty never observe deadlines anyway?

In an environment where many of the people I know pride themselves on their ability to go long periods without sleep, I alone am lying down, snoring. I like sleeping so much that one of my fondest memories involves the time I got so piss-drunk that I slept soundly for almost 24 hours without getting a headache. Sleeping is so much a hobby of mine that my mom sometimes complains that I just go over to her place to kip.

No argument from me there.

@_@

(LOOONG Digression: My CW 140 students—which included Cliff—who held my first real drinking session in hopes of finding out what I was like when I was drunk, found out to their dismay that I am, at best, only a mildly entertaining drunk. Apparently, all I did was to babble a bit about my colleagues’ indiscretions—instead of my own, interestingly enough—then, I sat off to one side grinning before I fell asleep.

When I woke up, I was slightly sober, and decided to go home. I got sleepy along the way, and some part of my brain dug up the information about safe driving: when sleepy, pull over to a well-lit place and nap for a bit. Why I decided that being under a lamppost in front of the squatter area on Kalayaan Avenue was safe will attest to my diminished brain capacities. [Let’s not argue about the normal state, OK? And the mooks who keep making fun of my Pocket PC mistake, well, the joke's on you because my Uncle Dave got such a huge laugh out of the whole thing that he decided to give me a new one. Ha!]

Anyway, I woke up to the sound of tapping on my window. Seems the roving cops saw me and decided to check me out. Cop tapping on window asked (in Tagalog), “Are you still alive?”

There isn’t a day that I don’t regret not telling him, “No.”)

@_@


Now where was I?

Once, in Subic, my sister Kat Kit and our housekeeper Matumila (so named because she sounds exactly like the amusing maid Matutina in the old comedy series “John en Marsha,” which I loved) had the misfortune to share a room with my dad and me. According to Kat Kit, I snored the bass line and my dad snorted the solo guitar all night in a free concert which they certainly hadn’t wanted to attend.

So it bugs me that these past few days, I’ve been getting along on three to four hours of sleep, which is barely half of my normal beddy-bye time.

The reason? Checking papers. Badly written papers. Lord in heaven, I want to take back the grades I gave out when I started teaching and raise everything to a 1. The mean average (hmm, was that a pun?) was 1.75 in the past for me. Now it’s 2.25 and I’m still “massaging” the computations for the final grades to bump them up. Argh.

Can’t wait for Wedding Essentials to be launched! ^_^

Labels: funny stories, sleepiness

Good Lord. Just when I thought that crass commercialism couldn't get any worse, I visited SM yesterday and saw that the Christmas displays were out on sale already. Hello, people, what about Halloween? I get the feeling they'd be happier if they could just stick a hose into our wallets and ATMs and just suck, suck, suck. (If that took you to a scary visual place-- ala Xander-- then congratulations.) Sigh.

*_*

It did remind me of something my sister Kit Kat encountered about two years ago, when she first learned how to drive. You know how carolers litter the streets during the Christmas season? One guy came up to her, and, feeling sorry for the poor soul, she dug into her coin tray and prepared to give him five bucks. Ordinarily, she prefers to shoo such people away, especially if they look capable of supporting themselves. Other times, she likes to give them food. But this one was particularly grim- and cadaverous-looking, and she had no food on hand, so she gave him cash.

He refused to take it without giving her something back, though. With a dignified step back, he drew breath, then proceeded to sing.

Well, "chant" is more like it; he delivered his song in a flat, cheerless monotone, all the while maintaining his grim expression. Kit Kat managed to control her laughter out of politeness; it was disconcerting hearing the cheery lines, "Ang Pasko ay sumapit! Tayo ay magsiawit/ Ng magagandang himig..." in his unique style.

Oddly enough, though, he maintained his dignity throughout the entire business, Kit Kat says. Handing him the five buck "tip" was like handing a five hundred buck gratuity to a pianist at some five star hotel.

I have never believed that your social class dictates how you see yourself. This man may have been in rags, and he may have been starving, but I can picture him now...and I only wish I had the same dignity of self that he possessed.

Labels: crass commercialism, dignity, funny stories

University Daze (after James Thurber)

Some clever student today should do an update, substituting the computer for the microscope, and a female athlete for Bolenciecwcz.- Writing Creative Nonfiction: The Literature of Reality (Gay Talese and Barbara Lounsberry)

Now that’s a tough challenge. Pulling a complete blank while facing a computer is pretty easy, and I do it quite often, especially when the blasted thing tells me that I’ve committed Error Number 1.%427^0qs$ and it’s about to crash. At best, computers and I are wary allies in the battle against Diablo; at worst, we are Iran and Iraq linked by keyboard, mouse, and screen.

It’s been a decade since the University decided it had had enough of me and threw me out; of course the correct term is “graduating,” but in the grind of the machinery we call “school,” March at the end of four or five years (and in the case of many UP grads, six, seven, eight, nine and ten, with the record going to a guy I knew who spent fourteen years as an undergrad) is like the dinging of the bell after you’ve finished microwaving your meal. It’s done when they say you’re done, and to hell with considerations of palatability and taste. Same with the average UP student, prestige and “Iskolar ng Bayan” aside, we’re a motley lot, usually only slightly better (or worse, depending on your sympathies) than the average school’s graduating batch.

I’m going to graduate again, this time, with a master’s degree. Do I feel like a master of creative writing then? Does this degree give me the right to pull a Simon Cowell on the unworthy in my writing classes? Lord knows I wish it did.

The new General Education program has me lusting after it; if I could, I’d take college all over again. No more PREREQUISITES! Pick the subjects you want!

Of course, with the quality of kids coming in today, here’s a series of updates to the “School Snafus” essay in my book, “Misadventures of a Disorganized Young Woman” (now that wasn’t shameless plugging now, was it?) I call them “School Snippets,” and here’s the first of what I hope will be a series. Enjoy.

School Snippet No. 1

I asked my intro to creative writing students to build blogs for fun. When submission time came, I asked them to submit the URLs on a small sheet of paper.

One paper came back with this: “My URL is changedtoprotecttheignorant@hotmail.com and the password is alsochangedforobviousreasons.”

I sent a text message to the girl explaining that what she had sent to me was her email address, and that the password should have been confidential. I also suggested that she use Blogspot, Livejournal, or other popular sites for blogs. As a precaution, I added that she should text me the words in the address bar of her browser. “That’s on top of the page,” I said.

She thanked me and sent me a message a week later with her new URL: WELCOME TO HOTMAIL

Labels: "joys" of teaching, funny stories