Day: January 3, 2009

I meant to publish this during the evening of December 31 but writing this entry took longer than I thought, and I was already late for New Year’s Eve shenanigans.

So I’m sitting here at the lobby of the pretentious condominium development my grandparents insist on living in when they’re at the city, getting a little bit of quiet before all sorts of new year’s eve mayhem covers the city in smoke and noise. Or maybe it won’t. For the first time ever, it’s raining like June or late May, which means that people won’t be lighting up as many firecrackers as they usually do. This time last year, Anne and I were holed up in my room where she was reviving my love and interest in slasher flicks, zombie movies, and horror film in general. I think we were watching The Hills Have Eyes, or maybe it was Hostel 2.

It’s crazy how 2008 just flew by like that, considering that December has been a slow, languid month for me. It feels like I spent most of my time sleeping, and my waking hours trying to do whatever it takes stay awake, simply because sleeping as much as I have been can’t be that healthy. Except for reading a couple of chapters on Mao Tse-Tung’s life on his birthday (December 26), I’ve had little interest in theory, history, and books in general. Maybe I’m going through another one of those moments again. I know I’m going to regret not being as productive as I should have been once I go back to school and remember that I’m supposed to be a graduate student who decided that her destiny lies in the academe. But I certainly don’t regret the time I set aside for the people who matter.

Photo by Fritz-paparazzi

One of this month’s highlights was hosting this year’s Man Blog Christmas party at my parents’ house. The Man Blog website and forums may be dead now, but my relationships with the smartest, wittiest, crassest guys and girls from the local blogosphere are still very much alive. Sometimes I think that maybe I should trade them in for nicer friends (just look at their gift suggestions for me this Christmas), but what would life (and my weekends) be like without them? Nice people aren’t much fun.

Just to show how much I love them, I pretended that I knew my way around a kitchen and prepared a fiesta ham and beer sauce for the party’s sit-down dinner. On Plurk the next day, Ade said it was the best ham sauce he had ever tasted.

Then we had what Anne calls the geekiest Secret Santa ever. Our presents for each other didn’t get any geekier than books, DVDs, gadgets, and ninja weapons (nunchucks for Jen from Bim!). Except for when Bim went down on Mike because Mike got the Gift of Nothing from us for the second Christmas in a row.

Exactly a week later, on Saturday morning, I woke up to a text message from Luis telling me to get out of bed. I was too sleepy to manage a reply, plus I was still slightly sore at him for ditching us last night. I was dying to get away from the monotony of my life in Manila, and Luis’s answer to my road trip idea was, “Nah, I got a couple of dates lined up for me this weekend.” Then I went online (I live on the Internet, pretty much), where Anne told me to get my things ready and help her look for a hotel in Batangas or Tagaytay. “Luis says we’re going on a road trip,” she said. “And he wants to stay somewhere pricey.”

“WTF I’m not paying for any pricey hotel,” I replied.

“Luis is paying.”

“K.”

After a stressful three hour search, we finally found a pricey hotel at Tagaytay that wasn’t fully booked for the night. Initially, we wanted to look for a place in Batangas so we could hit the beach the next day, but there were no vacancies anywhere. Anne suggested Puerto Galera, but Luis shot that idea down, saying that you needed to go on a one-hour boat ride to get to the island, a boat ride which he “didn’t quite fancy taking.” So cold, hilly, boring Tagaytay it was for the evening, then Batangas the next day. I was so excited - I haven’t seen the ocean in months and I miss the saltwater, sun, and the sand.

Three more hours later, I was done packing a backpack full of summer clothes, Helga finally woke up from her drunken stupor to join us, and we were on the road to Southern Luzon. By 9 pm, I was doing The Ultimate Hotel Expensiveness Test at 8 Suites - you know you’re staying somewhere fancy when you can jump on the mattresses without worrying about breaking your neck or the bed. AND HAHAHA NO PARENTS TO TELL ME TO STOP JUMPING ON THE BED WHEEEEE.

Dinner was at Leslie’s, where we had bulalo, chicken, and a huge fruit platter. My choice. I don’t normally enforce my gastronomic preferences onto my friends but when Luis told me, like a father to a child (”So uh…which one of us is going to tell her that we aren’t going to the beach anymore?”), that the beach was out of the question tomorrow, I felt as if I had the right to choose where to have dinner.

But all was forgiven once my belly was filled bulalo, chickon, and “pizza pineapple”.

After grabbing a couple of beers at a 7-11, we proceeded to spend the rest of the evening drinking like rock stars in our fancy-schmancy rooms.

And for a moment, we did feel like rock stars getting wasted in between shows, except none of us got laid and did drugs (that night). Not to mention that the only musical thing Luis can do is plonking out The Final Countdown on his brand new keyboard, which he only bought for the specific purpose of learning how to play that song. Sad huh.

Everybody was already awake and showered by the time I woke up the next day.

The Tagaytay winds that morning were just as cruel and unrelenting as the previous night’s, but we tobacco addicts braved the wind chill for the first cigarette of the day. Helga claims that I said that “Cows have fur!” in this video, but lucky for me the wind was too loud for the camera to capture the stupid coming out of my mouth.

While Helga and I camwhored on the balcony, Luis and Anne were being told by the front desk that 8 Suites had no vacancies for Sunday evening. Neither did any of the nicer resorts at Batangas.

I was hoping that this trip would be my sort of vacation from the Internet, which I already see too much of, but I ended up using Luis’s Macbook Air to Google resorts in Puerto Galera. If I wanted my beach we’d have to get us a reservation at an expensive Galera resort soon. Eventually, we found a fairly decent, fairly expensive place called the Marco Vincent who had space for us for the evening.

By 1 pm we were back on the road, trying to beat the traffic and reach the Batangas City port before the last ferry to Puerto Galera left at 3.

I wish I could write about the conversations that took place in the car and how the open road strengthened our friendship and deepened our appreciation for each other, but I spent most of the ride to Batangas sleeping in the back seat.

We reached the Batangas port at 3:30, fearful that we had missed the last boat to Galera. Though we were able to grab ferry tickets for the 4:30 trip, the last boat arrived thirty minutes late due because of the rough seas.

And for the first time in my life, I got slightly seasick. (That silly grin on my face is me trying very hard not to puke all over Luis.) I’ve ridden on small boats on rough seas before and the waves of the Batangas-Mindoro seas don’t look particularly violent, but the ferry to Galera rocked us forward, backwards and sideways more than any boat I’ve ridden before. By the time we reached the island, I was feeling all sorts of nauseous.

And my mood didn’t improve when I saw that the hotel people misspelled my name. I know it’s such a small thing, but it really irks me when people spell my name with an “O” - especially after I take the trouble to spell it out with an A-U for them.

If there’s one thing the Galera trip taught us, it’s that expensive does not always mean nice. Our room at the Marco Vincent was the tackiest room I have ever stayed at; the walls were the color of thousand island dressing, and the curtains were made out of lace and velvet. Velvet. Seriously. I couldn’t stand being in there, but Helga and Anne insisted on staying to watch The Hills or some other nasty reality show before dinner.

My narrative ends at the kebab dinner we had because nothing interesting happened beyond me drinking a lot of Mindoro Slings and sleeping in until 11:30 am the next day. What I do remember of Galera is that I like it a lot better than Boracay, even if the boat ride to Mindoro leaves little to be desired. The structures of the buildings, the stores on the baywalk, and the beachfront’s overall appearance doesn’t bother with an illusion of an expensive tropical escape from the Philippines. It looks exactly the way a beach in the third world should look like, and there are so few tourist areas in this country with that kind of honesty.

December has been good to me, but I feel guilty for being a lot less productive than I would have wanted. Maybe I do need a break from all the serious thinking that I do, but now my life feels too much like one long vacation. And I don’t want that. I feel as if there should be more to my existence than sleeping all day and waking up just in time for dinner and another party. Here’s to hoping that 2009 will wake me up from my lazy funk soon by bringing lots of activity, intellectual stimulation, career growth, new friends, and less free time!