Nevergirl’s

It’s all Mark Twain’s fault, it really is. All the husband did was ask what I wanted for Christmas. I’m sure he’d have given an eyeball to hear me say, “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.

Pregnancy is hell on the female body. I went from 96 pounds to 130 while pregnant with Charlie. The day I popped, I hit my all-time fattest – 136 pounds, barefoot (so I couldn’t very well pin the blame on my footwear). Still, if there’s one thing a newborn will do aside from cry over just about anything, it’s ask for milk every two hours. So there’s nothing new mothers can do except wake up every two hours to make milk and feed the babe – unless they want to put their newborns on forced diet. How difficult is it to wake up every two hours? Veeeery. Sleeping in two-hour increments will drive you mad. It will make you cranky. It will turn your eyeballs red and veiny. But it will also make you lose weight – lots and lots of weight. By the time we’ve had Charlie for a week, I was down to 115 pounds and had become a steaming, seething mass of hostility and irritability. It got so bad I made uranium look non-volatile in comparison.

Today, I tip the scale at 96 pounds. No, I am not on drugs. The weight just dropped. It’s strange and scary but hey, I’m thin again. I’m still irritable but I take it out on my keyboard. I play ‘Punch Your Co-Worker’ and it’s been good therapy (and no, this isn’t a subtle threat to co-workers who read this blog). I tried to cook but the attempt was short-lived. Even though the hub wasn’t expecting a miracle – only something edible – the meat was so tough it made his fork bend. This reminds me of the first and only time I tried to bake. In Mrs. Ello’s Home Economics class, my groupmates and I ended up with a cake so sturdy it fell off the table and didn’t crumble. It wasn’t eatable, either, as it would require a chainsaw to cut through that chocolate marble. The botched-up meal, notwithstanding, I wasn’t through playing domestic. I tried doing the laundry but just had to give up. Who knew the wash could be so complicated? Stripes, lights, darks, hand-washables, delicates, warm and cold rinses – these concepts make the head spin! Methinks it would be easier to just go build a working nuclear submarine using only staplers and staples.

So there, now you know. The life of a new mom is so exciting the only topics she has for blogging are sleep loss, spoiled meals, and establishing a relationship with the wash.