Nevergirl's

It’s all Mark Twain’s fault, it really is. All the roommate did was ask what I wanted for Christmas. I’m sure he’d have given an eyeball to hear me say, well, patio tables or maybe even “very sexy lingerie“. But feeling flippant, I said, “To wander without a compass” and then quoted Mark Twain: Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

He loved the idea – and that was how the Mark Twain project was born. Every other weekend, we will travel to an island we have never been to. We will start this 15th with Dumaguete, and then maybe Siargao or Bacolod later on, and perhaps an undiscovered island after? I can’t wait. For the first time in almost five years, I will finally have the time to wander. ‘course, we won’t be taking the kids along. Alex will only spend three-quarters of the time talking and Charlie will sleep through it all. Besides, we plan to make the most out of every trip by doing some of the things on our ‘Do Before You Die’ list. So yeah, it will be just the hub and me and the huge sky above. Fun!

The hub tells me not to sweat the small stuff but how could I not? A lot of things annoy me and one of them is the phrase “for future reference.” I mean, really, has any good news ever started with “for future reference”? Has any boss ever said, “For future reference, I will give you a raise every time you ask?” Or, “For future reference, please feel free to ask me to orally service you whenever you need to feel loved and unstressed looking up Network Architect Jobs“?

No. The phrase “for future reference” will always be followed by something that sucks vacuum cleaners. So the next time I find myself on the receiving end of a “for future reference” sentence, I will answer with a much more polite, non-threatening “for future reference” version. “Dear X, for future reference, please feel free to go f*** yourself.”

Oh, and for future reference, I am blogging like a crazed hoo-hee because the hub has been griping about the wasted monthly dotcom fees and because Vet’s sister visits this site daily only to find cobwebs. For future reference, I will be blogging like mad now so that if I were to be kidnapped, held at gunpoint, and then handcuffed to a MacBook and beaten daily until I could produce a guide for doddering old farangs who want to marry Filipinas 50 decades younger than they are, I can do so without chipping a nail or God forbid, ruining my mascara.

Must.not.sweat.the.small.stuff. For future reference.

I am getting dumber with each birthday.

I kid you not, I am. I was born awesome. I read my first adult novel at age 8. I googled the title and discovered it’s 487 pages of ill-disguised smut; no wonder I knew plenty of synonyms to ‘penis’ even as a child. To most 8-year-olds, a penis is that unnecessary body part that will only cause you pain and grief – it’s a free pass to the circumcision tent. To me, it was a schlong, a dick, a ten-inch pole, a raging erection. And, thanks to my uncles’ vast library of porn books, my vocabulary grew and grew.

I was my school’s extemporaneous speaking champion from second to sixth grade. I was also a loser who wore knee-high socks, sharpened pencils with her teeth, and obsessed about Adolf Hitler and concentration camps. By fourth year high school, I had morphed into a full-fledged geek. I critiqued provisions of the Visiting Forces Agreement for the schoolpaper, debated over the National ID system, learned Bahasa from an Indonesian nun in school, stole a German-English dictionary from the library so I could read Hitler’s Mein Kamp in German – and still wore knee-high socks with floral patterns.

Today, those tasks would be too much for me. I keep trancing out on pretty things. My mind has the terrible aptitude of skipping ahead to discover the results of events that have not yet happened and probably never will. Thus, all Iris has to do is mention “a hefty yoga project that will pretty much take care of this month and the next” and my mind would be off imagining dollar amounts that would let me pay off my plastics and take the kids somewhere awesome, like Tibet so Alex can fistfight a yak, or Angola where tribesmen remain so primitive they still wear loincloths but are savvy enough they talk gunrunners into taking their cows in exchange for M14s, M16s, and M21s. Then, I take a break from that hamster-brained thinking to have impure thoughts about Jack Johnson.

How can anyone with such short attention span succeed at anything? I’m getting dumber, I tell you.

“Brave girls get ice cream,” I told the little one gravely.

“Can it be strawberry ice cream?”

“Of course.”

“Chocolate?”

“Why not?”

“Okay, let’s do it.” She gave her hand to the doctor. He applied cream and sealed it in with gauzes. Twenty minutes later, he pried the gauzes off, injected her with anaesthesia twice, and proceeded to poke, pinch, and cauterize.

Alex screamed in an I’ll-die-from-this-pain-I’m-sure-of-it way for exactly two minutes. Minutes later, the wart came off – a sorry, shrivelled, yellow mass (oddly, it resembles a wasted duracell procell d) which the doctor somberly told my daughter he will throw into the bin where little men in funny little hats live.

Then it was time for wart number two to go, and this time around, she was ready. (The price of wart number two? Beads! Loads of them!) She started screaming long before the syringe touched her finger. “Hush,” said the poor doctor who, by then, had started sweating torrents. There was no way he could have a go at the wart with his thin, buzzing implement – not with her flailing like a drowning little person. Still, he persevered, we helped. An hour, several shattered eardrums, and PhP 1,500 later, the job was done. The doctor sat down – pale, sweaty, a broken man. “Please don’t grow any more warts until you’re 14,” he begged my daughter.

That was how Alex came to lose the two warts on her fingers that had grown to the size of Sibongga, and got two lightly-bandaged fingers with faces doodled on them in return. She calls the two “mummy kings” and has named them Amy and Nikola. But no, they’re not gay.