10 Things About Me

1. My first ever Technicolor dream was a nightmare. In it, I was surrounded by countless skyscrapers made of solid gold brown shit. The more I trembled, the more they shook, until they collapsed one by one with such thick splatters. I wanted to run away from it all, but my legs felt so heavy, they won't let me. So I did what I could--I screamed. And that wrung me out of those nasty REM cycles.

It's a recurring nightmare, though, until now that I'm 23. And it never fails to scare me.

2. When I was eleven months old, my parents kind of overlooked the fact that I'd been running high temperatures for 2-3 days already. When they took me to the hospital, the doctor said I'm going to die. But bad weeds don't die easily, so I survived, though I did get something out of that deal: now I have myopia, astigmatism, and cataract on both eyes.

3. As a 16-year old, I was a little curious about death. I took 2 packs of naphthalene balls and scattered the cute little spheres on the bottom of the closet. The following day, I took a can of Coca Cola with me and locked myself in that closet. Nothing happened. I just fell asleep. I woke up, got out of the closet and thought, "What a stupid plan to kill oneself."

4. Speaking of Coca Cola, I'm an addict to soda. I got it from my ex-boss Yayen who used to be a soda addict too. On an empty stomach I can consume a litre-and-a-half of soda in the morning, half-a-litre for lunch, and another litre for supper, not including indulgences on out-of-the-blue urges to drink soda. I'm also an addict to table salt. I can consume a bowl of salt in a day, paired with green mangoes, ripe mangoes, rice, SkyFlakes, Chippy, apples etc... I used to hoard red chiamoy in glass jars in my room but my parents confiscated them as I would finish off a jar-full in one sitting and end up lying in bed with high blood pressure.

5. I had a big chance to be First Honor when I was in grade school. Sometime towards the end of the school year when I was in first grade, I wrote a very obscene (and untrue) story about two of my classmates, something about them banging against the wall. I gave the note to them, which they gave to the teacher, for which the teacher summoned my parents to school. I stood in front of the class while my dad apologized and promised to give me the whacking I deserved. That incident killed my chances of being "First Honor" for my entire stay in grade school. That's when I became "Honor Unconscious" which I'm thankful for.

6. I wore a skirt for two weeks when I was circumcised.

7. I experienced flying when I was a kid. My dad used to have a big cherry red Honda motorcycle which he rode everyday to work. One day, as he was waiting for our gate to be opened, revving the engine furiously, I sneaked behind him and held on to some steel rods at the back of his bike. He zoomed away, laying 50 feet of rubber on half the length of Cardinal Street, while I held on, flying. Aghast bystanders yelled for him to stop and that was the end of my amazing joyride.

8. The first time I fell in love, I was soul-struck. I held on to it for six years, without the object of my affections not knowing a thing about it.

9. In senior year in high school, I wrote a song in a language I didn't understand. I was so proud of it that my parents seriously considered taking me to a psychiatrist.

10. I've never completely filled a notebook with notes all my life. I was working on one, lately, with barely 10 blank pages to go, until the notebook ran away. (I must have driven it away, considering all the stuff I filled it with.)