Walking with a goddess named Lu-Ann

Lu-Ann, the fairest of goddesses that I’ve ever known is leaving for Brisbane today. My heart sank, I didn’t know she’s leaving too soon.

Lu-Ann is a new-found friend from Down Under. A mixed brand between a Filipino-Chinese mother and a full-blooded Spanish father, she perfectly looks like a clone of who else but me. Joke! The truth is we’re both drop dead gorgeous: I look dead, she’s gorgeous.

Let her trudge the streets and you see necks craning and heads twisting just to worship her.

We hang out together just a few times not long before but we easily hit it off as “beacchy sistahz.”

I have the hard time decoding the “Haleerr” accent. She has the patience to act like a parrot for me, repeating every single word that made up every sentence that she’d blow into my eardrums. I call it a language barrier. She calls it a hearing problem.

A certified shopping addict, she crashes into the mall like a daily habit terrorizing every shop that plies with fashion accessories, bling blings, jewelry, bags, shoes, clothes and a lot more of kikay stuffs.

Mention of a shop that sells chocolate cake and she’ll get there in a flash. One time, we made a stop in a café that is famous for choco desserts. In between gobbles, we babbled everything about chocolate and the 5 million and one boyfriends she’s got (“ssshhh, don’t tell Momma,” his hazel brown eyes warned me). Funny, how stories aplenty can be told about chocs and boys.

Now that she’s heading for home sweet home, I just wish her all the best. OK, I will surely miss her but I know she’ll miss me more.

Breaking Into Dance

It’s summer! And I’d been gearing up to embrace it with reckless abandon. For someone like me who loves to do lots of (crazy) things all together most of the time, summer is the most relaxing part of the year. Or so I thought, not until I joined a dance workshop.

Over the weekend, I signed up for a two-day dance workshop with The Manouvers. Jason Zamora and Jon Supan (of The Manouvers) , together with US-trained professional dancers Chennie and Mabel taught us the foundation of hip-hop or locally known as street dance. Viola, only then I learned that hip-hop is just a hodgepodge of ancient moves like strut, funky and break dance!

“Are you sure you wanna do it?” I told myself. “Why not?” said the half of me. I think I have a fighting spirit that my body doesn’t understand.

I love to dance, no doubt about it. My solo dance performances, apart from the group presentations some of which I choreographed, in every Christmas or induction party I had in my elementary and high school classes can prove it. Looking back now, I wonder aloud how my classmates never launched a protest for seeing me dance in every class party we had; maybe because they saw me as an authoritarian class president. But who cares, I had fun.

But hey, dancing is not just about having fun, I learned from the workshop. It requires discipline and a lot of practice. I realized I don’t have the luxury of both, for now.

Nevertheless, more than anything else, I learned that DANCE means Decision, Action, No Compromise, Commitment and Excellence.

So I tried to strut my funky way until I broke my bones into dance. Literally, that’s hip-hop. My way. Urrghh?*&^%@!!!

Summer Fire!

i was in a middle of conversation with a long-lost friend who visited me at work when suddenly a colleague came out of the door behind me and shouted "there's fire in the neighborhood!" i was terrified not by his breaking news but by the way his lines pierced my eardrum... i went outside to check things out and true enough a black smoke billowed just above some structures which are a stone's throw away from our office...

that was about 4.30- p.m. (11 april 2005)

shortly, sounds of wailing sirens, of traffic cops' whistles, of honking cars, of raging fire and the shouts of victims and the cries of children dominated the airwaves while curious onlookers started to mill around the fire scene...

with the presence of international consultants and volunteers in our workplace, the scene of multi-colored people helping one another hauling computers, printers, books, files and everything their adrenaline can muster looks like a magazine feature story that had this title: "Filipino bayanihan goes international"

while everybody else was in frenzy, i went back inside and picked up my purse and two envelopes of personal files including photos (which I guess are one of life's valuable possessions), then i went out for safety..

i thought it was weird because i never did panic nor felt some surge of adrenaline; (maybe my exposure to a number of shocking realities, thanks to my stint as a news reporter, had something to do with it) there was something in my gut telling me that our edifice would be spared... i had all the presence of mind to utter a little prayer for the fire to stop, that no limbs and lives would be wasted...

and God heard my prayer....

on Spanglish

the movie may appear so simple as it depicts everyday-life of a family, but there are a number of insights that can be drawn from it...

here are a few :

lesson #1: a mother would rather die so her child may live

lesson #2: language difference is not much of a barrier if you have a translator

lesson #3: a monotonous almost involuntary day-to-day activity such as lying on a bed or stepping on the floor sometimes demand a very difficult, life-changing decision making process

lesson #4: sometimes an analogy such as floor:working brain or bed:damaged brain makes SENSE (go figure!)

lesson #5: for a child, 5 cents is 5 cents

lesson #6: guilt has a Spanish equivalent