June 29, 2003

LAST night's plans seemed seamless.

Was going to attend the staff meeting in the office at six, be back home before eight, zip over to Chrissie's party for dinner and maybe a few drinks and then head off to Malate and meet up with my friends at the Gay Pride celebration.

But most days never turn out the way you planned and yesterday was no different. The staff meeting lasted 'til nine, my friends flaked out, I was the last to arrive at Chri's party and I ended up spending half the night at her house.

Most of her guests had left by the time I got there and there was a huge table of food waiting just for me. When I was done stuffing myself with the excellent food [caesar salad, russian salad, killer lechon, pancit, lumpia, fried chicken, ube cake], we just hung around, drank a little and talked a lot.

We talked about a lot of things.

Happy Feet Sandals [Amazing how all my aunts - and even my mom - had their own pairs when they were young. And they all remember the sandals fondly.], dentistry [Of course! Congratulations, Chri!], celebrity gossip, the quirkiness of our family, school rules, high school literature, monks, priests, convents, sex change operations, India, the caste system, fixed marriages, female genital mutilation, the plight of women in Afghanistan [Yes, really.].

And that's just scratching the proverbial surface.

It was a good day for talking.

Maybe today would be a good day for action.


***

PREPAID card ran out at the worst possible time.

At three a.m. when I couldn't ask Supernanny to go out and buy a new one.

Had to resort to digging through my stack of old used internet cards to salvage the few minutes some of them might have left.

And yeah, the lucky bitch that I am, some of them still work.

Used what was left of one to update an old blog post.

Used another to e-mail Dragondude.

I'm using a third one to post this entry.

I still have eleven left.

Yeah, I think they'd last me 'til the morning. Or at least 'til I doze off.


***

The two three stooges

June 28, 2003

FIRST photo I submitted to The Mirror Project.

Still waiting for approval. They're up.


***

I was a teenage doormat

Not too many people know but I used to be a doormat.

And today I had to recount the tale of my idiocy to a group of eight or ten people, I didn’t really count. How I was almost duped into purchasing designer drugs in Hong Kong and then sneaking them back into Manila (it’s not as dramatic as it sounds, really). How I transcribed hours and hours of interviews that weren't even mine. How this bitch used to steal my articles and printed them as her own with her own fucking byline. How I endured shit for a year. (But hey, a year is just 365 days. Some women let their husbands beat them up for decades. I will not be one of them.) How nice I used to be.

But I ended my sad pathetic story with delicious words, delicious words I’d chew and gnat on for all their worth – “that was before.” Yeah, that was before, that was in the past, is not happening now, will never happen again.

And just today, I had several chances to prove to myself that I’m no longer that girl.

Because Shakey’s delivered the wrong pizza to my door. There was a time when I would have said, “oh well, they would get it right next time” and I would have reached for the first slice of the wrong pizza, disappointed but not really willing to do anything about it. But today I didn’t. Today I called them and told them about their mistake. I was polite but I demanded that they deliver the right pizza to my house, that I ordered pepperoni crunch and I don’t even like pepperoni that much so damnit, I wanted needed the crunch. Less than an hour later, they delivered the right pizza, sprinkled with loads of apologies.

Then, at the first staff meeting I attended as a real employee of the company I’ve been working for for almost half a decade now, I spoke up. I shared ideas and anecdotes and bagged some very interesting assignments. And after the meeting, I pitched ten story ideas to my boss – ideas I would really really love to work on - two of which I'd be working on this coming week. Some were a bit crazy but I didn’t shy away from voicing them out. Better try and be rejected than be the idiot who does nothing but think about the could-have-beens. No sign of being a doormat there.

And the best thing about these things is they come naturally now. There isn’t any real effort to conquer the old me because she’s really just not there - she's gone. Maybe she left, maybe she died, maybe she killed herself. I don't know.

I used to be nice. The girl who’s too polite for her own good. The girl you could abuse. Not anymore.

So don’t mess with me. I’m no doormat.

Or, as Astroboy would say, I’m no carpet.