08 February 2006
The prime shiftI have been crying the entire evening.
It is funny how I could get caught up in my own drama. Sure life kind of sucks and my future's one big blur and my present's not material for a happy story either. But these are not why I have been shedding tears.
My day was pretty eventful--it was a grueling day and the first half of which was spent in bed, sleeping. The other half was spent...er well in bed, um...reflecting, staring at the ceiling, stuffing myself with chocolate that I stashed and hid from the rest of my family in cases of emergencies such as this one. I started reading Twisted 7, the latest book by Jessica Zafra and although I highly enjoyed her humor and strong sense of the ironic, I started to pray that there would be irony when I deliver the report on it in front of very...serious people in partial completion of one of the most frustrating classes in my life as an MA student.
Last night (or early morning--around 1 am), I made a killer refrigerator cake which consists of crushed graham crackers, condensed milk, butter and loads and loads of all-purpose cream. (hmmm ALL-PURPOSE cream, is it just me or does that really sound kinky?) I topped it off with that yummy powdered mocha capuccino mix because I decided that it would be like a makeshift, fucked up tiramisu from cholesterol hell. I was too afraid to touch it before hitting the sack because I had every intention to wake up. Today, it was my constant companion and I held the Pyrex container everywhere I went.
Me, my robe, my stubble and an entire Pyrex of death. Promising.
So at sundown after changing from my robe to another robe, I wondered into the master bedroom. My parents lock their room when they are not at home but my mother always always always every freakin day tells me where she leaves her keys, a secret hiding place behind ceramic figurines, which leaves me wondering what the point of locking the room is. When my parents got rid of their beds (yeah, they had separate beds--weird but not really disturbing. you just get used to the idea that your parents are not the king-sized bed type of couple) and switched to a sofa bed, I started to think that perhaps they are cooler than me, the only son and eldest child who's supposed to bring in all the funk and teenage drama in the family. The walls are green and yellow. (Me, I stuck to very predictable blue and white and so Glen and Ler think my room looks like a chapel, or at least the door looks like it leads to a prayer room or something.) But still, this is not the catalyst of my sobfest.
I turned the TV on and channel surfing stopped when I stumbled upon "Entertainment Tonight" airing over RPN 9. The usual Hollywood drama never fails to make me sit there in an indian squat, eyes glued on the screen and a spoon hanging out of my mouth. Cream melting on my tongue like guilty pleasure worthy to be juxtaposed with celebrities baring their deepest, darkest secrets which basically do not compare with what we middle class kids from the third world have inside our closets.
And after that, "The Prime Shift."
The Prime shift is what RPN 9 calls their evening line-up which I just found out, is mostly made up of American shows. Like ninety percent, if not a hundred, is in that popular "reality" format. However, unlike those stupid ones that have a bunch of people staying inside a house for a hundred days in the hopes of catching them make out with each other, The Prime Shift's shows are those that appeal to people who loves the fact that they can think and feel. Tonight, "Iron Chef," "Three Wishes," and "Extreme Makeover Home Edition" were on.
"Iron Chef" is not an American Show but a Japanese show that had real issues in dubbing. But still, it proved to be entertaining, watching extremely skilled and experienced chefs scramble in a kitchen stadium as they prepare a magnificent meal within an hour. Today's theme was "truffle," some ingredient I don't think I have tasted yet, or if I had, I wasn't aware that I was eating it. If I was in fact aware, I would have dropped the spoon to run to the nearest bathroom because although a favorite French delicacy, it was still a kind of fungus--an expensive one but nonetheless.
"Three Wishes" is when my lacrimal glands started to go haywire. One wish was from a girl who wanted her sister to experience her high school graduation. I missed the cause of this but it was obvious that the sister was not able to march up the stage to get her diploma, well, because she cannot march. She even had a difficulty in speaking and perhaps she is paralyzed, or was paralyzed, or something. She had a team of therapists working on her and there was an events organizer sweating her butt off to gather all the high school classmates in order to recreate the commencement exercises.
The day of the "graduation," it started to rain and the hosts (or miracle workers) started to get upset for the graduation was set outdoors and the stadium was already decked. A large sign said "Believe" and apparently, this was the "powerful word" that held our paralyzed heroine together. (One of her therapy sessions had her in a swimming pool and her therapist was so hot with the tan and rippled abs so I started to think that being immobile had its perks after all.) But then, just before they totally resigned to postponing the evnt, a rainbow appeared in the sky. (God's talent in cinematography here.)
Needless to say, our heroine had her graduation. When her name was called, everyone froze as she stood up with much difficulty equivalent to single-handedly rebuilding the lost city of Troy. Everyone was crying and they cried even more when she, with the aid of her hot hot hot physical therapist who kind of looked like a young Tom Cruise, attempted to walk. He held her under her arms, and she started to take steps towards the principal. At this point, I had to call someone to mop the puddle of tears off the floor. "Believe."
"Extreme Makeover Home Edition" was supposed to be fun but perhaps I am too condescending to enjoy it for what it just was: a home makeover. The house, or the shack, belonged to a young Mexican couple with four kids. They lived in LA and when the husband's mom died from a stray bullet while she was vacationing in the couple's house, they took in his five very young brothers and sisters. Instantly, they became a family of eleven and since then, they had been struggling with the bills, the social workers scrutinizing their shack and not to mention keeping that "house" from crumbling to the ground.
Luckily, the "design team" came to save the day.
The family was hauled to Disneyworld for a week and during this period, the design team demolished the house and rebuilt a new one. (No exaggeration--what can I say, the wonders of the first world...) From a structure that only had one sort-of-functioning-but-not-really-working bathroom (one had to use pliers to turn on the shower), the new three-story house featured a two-story master suite, a dinosaur-themed boys bedroom complete with huge dinosaur bunk beds and toys, a spy-inspired bedroom complete with sophisticated surveillance equipment, a "Miss America" themed bedroom, a Mexico Heritage room, a music room, a study for the kids which had like four personal computers, a gourmet kitchen and a bathtub. The most touching scene is when the autistic kid's face lit up when he entered his new room which took a skilled interior designer and a pair of experts (psychiatrists, I think) to plan and put together.
The family kept on crying as they hopped from one room to the other and I myself was consuming my fourth roll of tissue when it got to the part where someone promised to pay their year's worth of utilities. And then I suddenly became sure that that's what I want to do. I want to help people like that, make a difference and somehow make it possible for the less fortunate to experience what growing up for me was like. (Er, well not the drama part, just in the economic sense.)
For this endeavor, a masters degree in creative writing will not help me. I shall need a devoted staff, a production crew, some state of the art equipment--one OB Van and at least eight cameras--the best make-up artist and wardrobe assistant as well as a slot in the primetime mainstream TV. But this won't be another one of those "helping out the masses" sort of gameshow that's gonna be responsible for a stampede and the death of close to a hundred. This will be pure class and I can't wait to behold the look on a takatak boy's face when I present him with his very first summer wardrobe.
So after crying over those shows, after being touched by real-life drama, I started sobbing out of fear for myself--Deus knows I need to find a new routine in my life before I get too soft.
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