New Year
New Year, same old problems.
I wish my first blog for the 2007 could’ve been happier, but I just checked arkibongbayan.org and that drove all cheerful thoughts right out of my head. I have to take a moment and try to be less…sad.
The last week I immersed myself in family gatherings. I’m not really the family-type, (during reunions I often hide myself behind curtained recesses); but because I’ve been away for a bit, and before my escape to Hong Kong I was often busy with work, I thought I’d give the whole family-thing a whirl. It makes my mom happy to see me be normal for a change, and to not talk politics or make snide comments about reports in the newspapers. She would rather I sit at the dinner table and stuff myself with cake and fruit salad (and yes, I admit, there’s a part of me that prefers that, too).
I love my nieces and nephews. So there. It’s the babies who make the gatherings worth attending. They keep everyone happy, keeping conversations and discussions away from the more serious and often depressing topics of work, personal difficulties, and sickness and death in the family.
The babies crawl and gurgle and giggle and coo and belch and all the adults forget all their adult problems.
The best story I’ve heard so far is of my four year-old nephew Abby (eldest of my cousin Amy and her husband Bobby) turning to his dad one afternoon when they were all in the living room watching DVD cartoons and saying, from out of nowhere, "Daddy, pag inaway mo si Mommy ipapupulis na kita!"
That brought the house down. Abby is such an alien! We never know where the hell he gets his ideas and the words he uses.
I ate a lot and slept a lot and watched a lot of DVDs (zombie horror fest) and cleaned the house (we just moved, and it was exhausting trying to find a new place for every old thing we own). Walked around Ayala to see the lights and to drink insanely expensive tea and coffee. I didn’t write much, but I read some. Finished ‘Wicked’ by Gregory Macguire and was upset (nah, it was very good; but it was also very sad). Lent my services as personal shopper (haha, but that’s what she calls me) to Novaleeh. That trip to the ukay stores, sorting through racks of used clothes and picking out the not-so-used looking ones was the main outlet for my creativity this nearly ended holiday season.
Uso pa ba ang mga resolutions? Kasi kung oo, I have a few of them, but am not going to post them here because they’re too silly for words.
Mostly though, I will try to be a happier, less dark, less depressing person. Maybe I will even wear the dangly earrings my sister Majal gave me, and that hippie blouse that a rainbow threw up on.
—–
Watched ZsaZsa Zaturnnah and raved about it afterwards. Kim is getting sick and tired of hearing me sing ‘Babae ako, uy Didi tignan mo…’, retorting, "Oo na, babae ka na!"
We all loved the comic book and we’re crossing our fingers for a sequel. The movie was not a disappointment and we had fun fun fun (although it was a bit of a dampener, the fact that there were so few people in the theater with us when we saw it, tsk-tsk-tsk).
—-
