Nevergirl’s

I don’t know why anyone would prefer taking the driver’s seat to the passenger’s seat. Getting from point A to B is stressful enough without me having to worry about traffic signs and over every other car on the road. This is why I loved living in Cebu. No destination was ever too far to ask being driven to, and if all else fails, one could always hop on a cab.

And then, we moved here. Everything is at least three hours away. There are no cabs. The only options for commute are buses: Bachelor buses, and the rickety ones that look like ailing water softeners, that look like they’d die on you any minute. When I’m lucky, I can get the roomie to drive me to the city. When he can’t, he has the driver who doesn’t happen to have a trip scheduled for the day to pick me up. This limits mobility to a very dramatic degree, and so it was that when the roomie insisted for the umpteenth time that I learn to drive, I finally did.

I’ve been to driving school twice. The first time around, I had classes so early I go through the motions of learning to drive half-asleep. By the time my course ended, we realized I learned only two things: how to put the key in, and how to start the engine.

Fast-forward to this year. I went to driving school again. This time around, we picked the afternoon class. As reward for not nodding off, I get fed steak after. I paid better attention to my instructor who swears I have a death wish, that the brakes should be glued to my foot.

I’m happy to report I can drive with better success these days. By better success, I mean no pedestrians mowed over, no tree felled, no gates unhinged, no car pile-up left in my wake. But, I drive only when I really need to—and this is something that relieves everyone in the house as much as it relieves me. I know only two people brave enough  to want to be in the same car as I, when I’m driving. The yaya that  left cited this as one of her reasons for leaving. She says my driving stresses her, that she ends up gripping the seat so hard she suffers a toothache after.

Really, why anyone would want to be driver instead of passenger is beyond me. Meanwhile, the roomie swears the only time he’d let me drive is if he’s in the middle of a heart attack, and couldn’t take the wheel.

Keema is a powerful motivation force. Unfortunately, we do not have it here. I know I’m back in the boondocks when keema walks about on all fours, and I’m not allowed to stab them with a fork. We have sheep, but it’s sacrilege to even think of eating them because, as I have been lectured one time too many, “they’re family.” This doesn’t lessen my hankering for keema, though. If anything, I jones for keema even more, and though our sheep are the cutest, I give them the evil eye each time I pass by.

How is it even possible that we have sheep (real sheep, the bah bah black sheep kind), and I can’t have keema?

I’ll do anything for keema. Anything. For keema, I’d drive a tank through enemy lines and mow down a battalion. I’ll crush a few cars, too, while I’m at it. For keema, I’d stab a neighbor, walk pitbulls and Rotts (breeds I’m deathly scared of, by the way), glue a bajillion glitters and laces to wedding invitations, and even try to wrap my head around the idea that they’re a study closer to breaking Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, that they have found particles that travel faster than the speed of light. I will do anything for keema. Anything.

Short of selling a kidney, that is.

I’m supposed to be checking the affiliate codes on a website on cigar humidor but my productivity took the day off, and instead I spent the last hour watching a series of Burger King documentary commercials called Whopper Freakout. The company rigged a branch in Nevada with hidden cameras, and got actors to pose as servers. As customers ordered their Whoppers, they were

1) told their whoppers are no longer available; the product has been discontinued.

2) served burgers from Wendy’s and McDonald’s.

The reactions were genuine and absolutely funny, and supposedly created a double-digit growth for Burger King. You can watch the 7-minute video here.

Just goes to show that for people to realize the incomparable value of what they have, they have to lose it first.

I’m flabbergasted by all the emotion Steve Jobs stirred up by stepping down. Grief? Are you people serious? You actually grieve over the retirement of a gazillionaire whose most presssing concern may be a bad liver? If that’s all it takes to cause an outpouring of extreme sadness on your end, I say leave your house sometime and try joining the rest of the world. I almost chewed off my typing fingers (all two of them, yo!) in an effort not to respond because going all righteous and hulksmash would only be wasting the other person’s time and mine.

Anyway, I accidentally discovered a five-second solution to stress (and no, it’s not chucking portable phone batteries at strangers or doodling fireplace mantel designs). I’ve all but torn out my hair agonizing over the crazy deadlines at work, and a few other things I signed up for in a weak moment (okay, that’s a cop-out; what weak? I probably mean mad). My stress level went all sorts of haywire last week: I came down with asthma for three days, and then woke up one morning to terrible allergies. How terrible? My right eye was swollen while my left eye was all but shut!

Thanks to the unplanned physical transformation, I had to spend two days with sunglasses glued to my nose. This isn’t as ganster-cool as it sounds; I must have slipped down stairways three times, and a friend or two poked fun at how very Paris Hilton-ish it was of me to wear sunglasses at 3am. We rushed to the ER, too, but after getting poked at with a thermometer and asked to give a run-down of the day’s menu, I was sent home with a P500 bill and a prescription for Benadryl. I groused a bit about the bill—how ridiculous is it to be asked to pay P500 for having your temperature taken?–but I regained my zen the moment I discovered how deadly effective Benadryl is at knocking me out. I’ve been sleeping like a baby since my ER visit. I hope I don’t grow a tolerance to Benadryl; Sleepasil stopped working for me a long time ago.

But I digress.

The five-second solution to stress is rapping. I discovered this while waiting in the ER. I made up rhymes in my head to keep from going cuckoo, and to my surprise, it proved to be a fun exercise.

This is a shit-assed week
I got fresh rhymes drippin’ from my badass beak
The ER may not be the dopest crib in the ‘hood
But it’s all cool coz I can rhyme good.

I realize I rhyme lame, but since I don’t plan to join a ganstar rap battle anytime soon, it’s all good in the ‘hood, yo!