So I googled myself a few minutes ago to see if I had any sort of online presence, and found the search results interesting. The first few entries led to a fan site dedicated to a local childstar-turned-teenage heartthrob, some movies of whom I have already seen (he’s quite good actually). Hardly a surprising matter, since people still make a big fuss about us (the young actor and me) sharing the same name. To this day, when I reveal my name to some people, they’d pretend not to see glaring physical differences and ask me, “Are you the movie star?”
Here’s what got me riveted though: almost all of the other search results directed me to write-ups about someone—also sharing my name—killed by the Filipino delicacy called suman. According to the Manila Bulletin website, “Police said [my complete name] was declared dead at about 2pm at the Rodriguez Hospital.” In his article entitled “Suman kills 2-year-old boy; 6 critical,” Alex Silva of People’s Tonight could not be more specific: “[the victim ate] suman sa ibus given by Emily Villaruz from Bicol.” Another Google entry entitled “Cyber Prayer” linked to the official website of Abante-Tonite, one of the premier and most trusted tabloids in the Philippines. Under its Crime Stories section, writer Ian Cruz refined the story further: on top of food poisoning, [My complete name]’s main cause of death was pneumonia, an affliction he had to begin with.
On a very different note, I have got to be the worst writer there is.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
psychic boys
When I got stranded in the middle of Marcos Highway (Baguio-bound) last week, I had no choice but to wait for more than an hour for my cousin to pick me up. It was getting dark, and the only course of action to take was to give up, curse the radiator, park the car on the side of the road, look for a place to sit, and try not to rot. I found a small house perched on the edge of a cliff and asked the owner for water.
Low on food and cigarettes, I asked the owner if there was a nearby sari-sari store I could go to. She said there was, but to get there I’d have to walk several kilometers. I said “Thank you” and decided to stay where I was.
I sat on the house’s front porch, looking at rows of sunflower seedlings (for sale) while other Baguio-bound vehicles drove past. It’s going to be a long night, I told myself. It was cold and dark and I was hungry. There was nothing to see except for headlights of oncoming buses and cars. With nothing to do, I amused myself by thinking about fruitless things, such as this: Even as a kid I always wondered what it would be like to get marooned in Marcos Highway or Kennon Road. Sometimes I wished it’d happen to me, just to get the thought out of my system. We should really be careful what we wish for.
After a while, two young boys came out of the house and sat on the wooden stools beside me. I didn’t think they speak Tagalog, so I kept mum for a couple of minutes. One of them, the younger one, initiated a conversation, asking what I was doing in their front porch. I told him my car was on the blink, and that his mother let me stay there temporarily. The older brother asked me where I was from, and I replied, “Manila.”
The kids were actually from Guisad, Baguio City, and they were just visiting their parents’ roadside flower store. Their names were JR (eleven years old) and Harley (eight years old), and, in addition to being bright grade school students, the universe entrusted them with a special gift: they can see dead people. For almost an hour they recounted their paranormal experiences—which for them required a painful getting used to as they were growing up—while I listened. I told them that my father used to see ghosts in full costume from the American Occupation years and that I had two nightmares wherein Missy Elliot was the Devil or something.
There’s a long tunnel near their school, they said, that was used by Japanese soldiers during the second World War. When the war was about to end and the Japanese had to flee, they got stuck inside an unfinished tunnel construction. To this day, people would still be hearing howling sounds from that tunnel.
Not that I fully believed in paranormal phenomena, but I thought I’d ask the kids some unexplainably terrifying questions because the conversation was truly interesting and, boy, were they really excited about the subject. Like, are there zombies?
Finally, the reinforcements arrived. (My cousin came all the way from La Trinidad to pick me up). As I was saying goodbye to these two fascinating kids, I asked them when they intended to return to Baguio City. “We’re going there tomorrow to visit the dead,” Harley said. “Creepy,” I remarked, thinking they were planning on some spirit quest. When it occurred to me that the following day was the first of November, I told them as an afterthought, “Oh, you meant ‘visiting your loved ones in the cemetery.’”
Low on food and cigarettes, I asked the owner if there was a nearby sari-sari store I could go to. She said there was, but to get there I’d have to walk several kilometers. I said “Thank you” and decided to stay where I was.
I sat on the house’s front porch, looking at rows of sunflower seedlings (for sale) while other Baguio-bound vehicles drove past. It’s going to be a long night, I told myself. It was cold and dark and I was hungry. There was nothing to see except for headlights of oncoming buses and cars. With nothing to do, I amused myself by thinking about fruitless things, such as this: Even as a kid I always wondered what it would be like to get marooned in Marcos Highway or Kennon Road. Sometimes I wished it’d happen to me, just to get the thought out of my system. We should really be careful what we wish for.
After a while, two young boys came out of the house and sat on the wooden stools beside me. I didn’t think they speak Tagalog, so I kept mum for a couple of minutes. One of them, the younger one, initiated a conversation, asking what I was doing in their front porch. I told him my car was on the blink, and that his mother let me stay there temporarily. The older brother asked me where I was from, and I replied, “Manila.”
The kids were actually from Guisad, Baguio City, and they were just visiting their parents’ roadside flower store. Their names were JR (eleven years old) and Harley (eight years old), and, in addition to being bright grade school students, the universe entrusted them with a special gift: they can see dead people. For almost an hour they recounted their paranormal experiences—which for them required a painful getting used to as they were growing up—while I listened. I told them that my father used to see ghosts in full costume from the American Occupation years and that I had two nightmares wherein Missy Elliot was the Devil or something.
There’s a long tunnel near their school, they said, that was used by Japanese soldiers during the second World War. When the war was about to end and the Japanese had to flee, they got stuck inside an unfinished tunnel construction. To this day, people would still be hearing howling sounds from that tunnel.
Not that I fully believed in paranormal phenomena, but I thought I’d ask the kids some unexplainably terrifying questions because the conversation was truly interesting and, boy, were they really excited about the subject. Like, are there zombies?
Finally, the reinforcements arrived. (My cousin came all the way from La Trinidad to pick me up). As I was saying goodbye to these two fascinating kids, I asked them when they intended to return to Baguio City. “We’re going there tomorrow to visit the dead,” Harley said. “Creepy,” I remarked, thinking they were planning on some spirit quest. When it occurred to me that the following day was the first of November, I told them as an afterthought, “Oh, you meant ‘visiting your loved ones in the cemetery.’”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
