SPEAKING OF NOW

Hello, stranger.

That greeting is actually not just for you, dear reader, but also for me, dire writer, so welcome back to both of us. I'd prefer not to waste time and pixels addressing the whys and wherefores of my inactivity and instead focus on getting this blog back up and running. Again. For the eleventeenth time.

Two things: I made a quick redesign, nothing too fancy, and I imported a bunch of posts from my other blogs, which by the way were quite surprising as I could not remember writing some of them at all. I even took some phrases and googled them, flanked by quotation marks, to make sure they were truly mine and not lifted from somewhere else (good news: mine!). Also, I've decided to write my posts the way an educated adult should and quit emulating E.E. Cummings.

Speaking of, I'm going to be a father again! Of a baby boy this time, which is just whoawesomazing. Yes, that's whoa, awesome, and amazing in one word because that's how I feel about it. Especially since my wife and I have been trying for so long. I wanted him to be born in 2013 (because duh) but I guess the financial crisis caused massive stork layoffs and delayed the delivery of our son to April of this year, which is peachy fine. Really. It's not like time seems to go slower when you wait for something. It's only three more months, no biggie. I very patient.

Speaking of, during Jeean's third checkup, my heart twerked when we heard the little human's heartbeat for the first time and I had to control myself from RKOing the nurse and yelling, "Science, bitch!". Then, a few months later, when OB/GYN Kenobi pointed an arrow to our son's tallywacker on the ultrasound screen, I shook my fists in the air and screamed in victory as I saw our future together projected onto the inner walls of my skull: my wife and I playing Final Fantasy VII Remake on the PS5; Iaine and her little brother washing the dishes.

Oh, and Iaine, who is as excited, if not more, as I am, is turning six this week. She's grown so fast. Feels like it was only yesterday when I dropped her off to school and told her to do well in her exams. Wait. That was actually yesterday. What day is it today? Anyways, those six long years mean I have basically unlearned all the baby care skills I mastered when Iaine was still small. However, I fear not the slumberless nights for I know that when the epic newborn is thrust into this dimension, I shall regain all that power and conquer the realm of second-time fatherhood. So bring on the poop!

One more thing I seem to have unlearned: properly ending blog posts. So bye?



P.S. That is the first and the last time I will use the word that starts with T and means "shake your butt like shit is stuck."
P.P.S. My wife's OB/GYN is not really named Kenobi.
P.P.P.S. Is it the third week of April yet? Please be the third week of April when I wake up tomorrow.
P.P.P.P.S. Actually, please be April after Iaine's birthday. Sorry, Iaine.

year two

for two years, you have endured my existence and forgave my shortcomings. i am a slob, a deviant and an occasional asshole, but you've put up with me every time. a medal forged from a meteor won't even suffice to represent how awesome you are. i love you, m'lady. for everything you've been/done/given to me, thinks.

my better half is best

i am blessed to have a spouse whose external beauty is only surpassed by her internal resplendence. i plucked her from the flower garden and planted her in nibelheim. she now has surrendered herself to the hivemind.

she has temporarily rainchecked her nightingaling for the sake of our beautiful offspring's growth and has taken on the mantle of a freelance creative desginer. my swan wife weaves her clients' dreams into printer-bound realities. her husband is so proud of her inimitable talents and grateful for her pecuniary assistance. the stork had chosen wisely.

gianina, my wonder woman, the universe envies the expanse of my love for you.

hair spew: the mane issue

every weekend i'd be home with my smiling scion of sweetness and my sweet spouse of smiles and there'd always be a moment where the latter would take notice of my hair and ask me to have it cut. and every time that happens, i always tell her i'd do it only when everyone ceases forcing me to suffer another monumental trimming of my life. and every time i say that, she points out that i'm just saying that and that i have actually no plans of getting a haircut.

partially, she is correct but from my standpoint of view, that's something you do not plan. right now, yes, i do not want to lose my locks. but that fateful time will arrive (maybe tomorrow, i don't know) that i'll wake up and the first thing in my head as agreed upon by all of my mental entities will be to get a haircut. and then i'll probably google the hairstyle i'll want to have, which of course, ought to be something i've never had before.

but let's cue the flashback blur effect and siphon some background on the topic at hand. (this might be long so if you're busy, uninterested or on the verge of death and would rather read something more thought-provoking, you are permitted to leave as the two previous paragraphs seem enough to fulfill the primary objective of this post)

when i was a kid, i had moptop beatles hair, probably because my dad was a big fab four fan. when i started going to school, it was trimmed in such a way that it looked like a bowl was placed on top of my head and the barber made cuts straight along the rim. i rocked those rulered bangs for many years with occasional gel-enabled rizalian pompadour days. as puberty took over, i gradually lost my maternal dependence and began to loathe my hair. i developed a habit of jerking my head upwards to get strands off my face. i had to carry a comb around in my pocket but for some inexplicable reason, i kept losing that beige-colored toothed piece of plastic.

and then came high school, which meant four years of bad hair days. looking back, i still cannot comprehend why we had to have haircuts with such specific dimensions, three fingers from the ear and two from the eyebrow, if im correct. for all of my adult life i have never been in any job or situation where that haircut was required. anyways, a centimeter longer and an administrator would chop a chunk off forcing you to have an even stupider haircut than the infamous keempee look. skinheadedness was frowned upon back then and i never intended to go bald because i was so skinny then and wore glasses half of high school that i thought i'd look like gandhi. i also got tired of buying new combs so around third year, i decided i wasn't going to be a slave to grooming. i stopped combing my hair. of course, i'd use my hand to run through it when needed but i eschewed combs completely.

college onward, i took the haircut liberty to new verticals. i wore caps in class. i got spikes. undercut? sure. one day i'd be long-haired and then the next day, everything's suddnely mowed down to baldness (i got sick the first time). i even had my hair dyed red and got called rodman or moffat by strangers. i had it braided but never got the chance to get dreads. i did all of these things to my hair just because i wanted to. never due to fads.

but of all the hair metamorphoses i went through, i felt most comfortable wearing my hair long. not because i like rock music. (the top two questions i always get asked because of my hair: are you in a band? do you have a lighter?) i just like it this way. when i was younger and making comic strips on old notebooks instead of playing outside, i created my imaginary adult persona and he had ponytailed long-hair all the time so i guess having hair like this was one of my childhood dreams. (that guy was also very muscular and always had a lit cigarette on his lips -- staples of a boy's concept of coolness, i think -- but i never had either ever) ive stuck to using a specific brand of shampoo believing it helps in the faster growth of my already fast-growing hair. i'd avoid shaving facial hair for a couple of months and people would start calling me jesus.

so yeah, this is the definitive jai hairdo. how long it will get depends on the time i get the urge to see the mirror image of scissors murdering my scalp grass or if circumstances call for it (like when i got married), whichever comes first.

what it all comes down to is this: people think men look better with short hair not because it's the truth but because that's they been programmed to believe. so, as with most things, no one should force anything upon anybody just because it's dictated by the norm. hair length shouldn't be an issue. that's the long and the short of it.


p.s. i just got promoted recently, which means my hard work paid off, which mean my salary will increase (by how much, i dont know) which does not mean im coming to work with a new haircut. hah!
p.p.s. im halfway watching the kids are all right and already there've been two scenes involving gay porn. wtf. i dont know if i should go on, afraid there'll be more. i want to vomit. and watch five hours of real 100% straight made-for-real-men porn just to unsee that crap.

there are b-sides to every story

years ago, round the time when i only had one sibling, my father worked overseas. he'd mail us pictures of himself standing alone in the middle of the desert or sitting in his room, wearing a keffiyeh and sporting a badass beard and my mom would send him photographs of us with notes written on the back. and then, sometimes we'd be gathered in the living room, hunched over this silver casette player making voice recordings. though i have no distinct recollection of what childish crap i yapped about to my far-flung father (probably how we missed him, my shoe size and some toy i wanted to have), i do remember a particular portion of those recordings, the recurrent theme song of my parents that concluded our voice tapes:

 

anyways, to compare, if in the future i leave my family to work abroad, there'll be no hardcopy photos in the mail with scribbles in the back, we got facebook. and jeean wont have to subdue a hyperactive iaine just to record her wishlist, we got skype. still, the mere thought living several time zones apart from my two beloveds is an immediate ticket to boohooville. acclimating to different area codes was hard but i managed it because there's text and that comforting knowledge of being able to scurry home in a dozen jiffies. to actually spend a year or two in another country without getting to hug my wife or play with my daughter is gonna be quite an ordeal. i extremely hope that it never comes to that.

p.s. as of this typing, hitgirl is still battling cold and fever. give the cute little baby girl a break, will ya?

p.p.s. and my best friend, jeean, is dueling with stress. cut the gorgeous sexy woman some slack, will ya?

...and i'm back (to blogging/working)

hmm just before i sat to type, i had a couple of excuses sentences constructed in my idea factory explaining why the blog was in limbo for three-months but i decided not to put them here for the same reasons that the blog was in limbo for three-months.

anyways, if you watch futurama then get prof. farnsworth's voice in your head because i'm about to say: "good news, everyone!" im a bum father no more! well, im a long way from buying my daughter dollhouses and ponies but i just landed a job as a transcriber for a research/software company and it's really great. ive worked for many companies that declared their employees were their assets and they valued their workforce but those words have never been true until now. i refuse to go into details but let's just say that the perks definitely perk you up.

the downside of it all is that five days a week, im far from iaine and jeean. it's impossible not to miss my wonderchild and loving wifi. skype helped but even if it ever gets the 3d upgrade, it can never equate with the bliss of actually being there with them. treading new environment and making new friends was fun but i kept counting the hours that always seemed to stretch further every time i checked the time.

when i got home this morning, i came upon a sleepy iaine who beamed up at the sight of me. i carried her and she gave me a where-have-you-been look. the super spouse arrived shortly and i was happy to be surrounded by love. iaine and jeean are the two defibrillator paddles to my work-worn heart.

i listen to the art of war during my office-bound commuting and sun tzu said: "do not interfere with an army that is returning home" because a man whose heart is set on returning home will fight to the death against any attempt to bar his way and is therefore too dangerous an opponent to be tackled.

clear!


p.s. the awesomous wifus is also undergoing training of her own. what has two thumbs and is very proud of his nurse wife? this guy.
p.p.s. ...and i'm 30 years old.

parental guidance

chronicling iaine's growth in a full-length indie film called life.

one

what: most. kickass. wedding. ever.
where: basilica church + pastoral center, ciudad de balisong
when: august 1, 2009
who: jaiskizzy (the groom), jeeanfoxy (the bride), families, friends, unknowns
why: love.


800am: i wake up, put on outdoor clothes and sleepwalk to the nearest salon to have my much-anticipated (by everyone but me) haircut. it is still closed so i saunter off next door to my mother-side relatives' hangout spot and play with the kids for a while.
900am: i am inside the salon, sitting on a hydraulic chair, waiting for my turn. arianne the hairdresser is doing his magic (literally) on an old woman while some people are negotiating the price of his services and gown rental. some girl will be joining a beauty pageant in some faraway farmland's fiesta and her companions want her to look outrageously beautiful. i think what they need is a miracle. the girl is fat, fugly and bats are probably living in her nostrils. plus her supposed escort is a zombie. i silently thank the invisible unicorn king for the self-esteem boost.
1000am: my past-shoulder-length hair is being mowed down. with my spectacles off, the horrifying image of my decreasing mane is blurred on the mirror. but even so, i remember the big prom night scene in carrie and kinda feel the same way, minus the blood. at least samson was asleep when this happened to him.

1100am: i am back home, showering. bathroom floor is covered in bubbles because, forced by habit, i used the amount of shampoo i use for my late long hair on my new hair. as always, bathroom time is think time and several random thoughts fire up in my brain like popcorn: the tedious preparations are finally over, im leaving bachelorhood for good, cant wait to see what my bride looks like, what's gonna happen, et cetera.
1200pm: i am driving towards the ponte fino, wearing a hooded shirt to hide my haircut until the big reveal. jeean and i text and call each other occasionally to prevent any path-crossings. as i am about to turn right at don ramos, i realize i've forgotten the red bandana i need for our first dance. i head back home and find out that jeean's bridal car (c/o of papang) has arrived. we've been told it would be the cefiro, anything was okay with us actually, but im looking at the one we had wished for secretly. i retrieve the bandana and keep the surprise to myself.
100pm: i am at the hotel lobby, gradually attaining complete ennui. only one room is currently available and jeean is in there having herself made up. two more rooms will be vacant soon and i sulk in a lounge chair, watching a kid waste dslr specs on a bland table ornament. my friends from manila arrive but because i have no room to put them in and i am prohibited to leave the premises, i send them off to sm batangas to have lunch and murder a few minutes.
200pm: six men in a hotel room and it's not a stag party: me, pol, randell and a camera crew determined to get me posing. after late lunching on adobo, rice and jolly hotdog, the guy who has only one pair of shoes for everyday use metamorphoses into a long-suited, clean-shaven gentleman, at least externally; the photography session ends up with me jumping on the bed. the tailor-made suit set feels good on me not only because it's exactly the way i wanted it to be, it's like my golden fleece. i'm 11 times cooler just by wearing it.
300pm: it's raining and everybody's scrambling to the church. i jump into the family car and lose my chance of having any physical contact with the awesome bridal car. when we arrive at the church, a crowd of kids and adults in wedding attire is just beginning to bunch up near the entrance. people expecting my jesus christ look are shocked at my new guise and my favorite baby niece who cries when i leave doesn't even recognize me. i look at the aisle and see the first few meters of the new journey of my life.
400pm: i am at the other end of the aisle and all our eyes are on the entrance doors. this is my cad goddeu. from a badass-looking hummer, an angel has appeared to bless us with her heavenly beauty. ive been an agnostic ever since catholic school but this is one of those very rare moments were i question my non-belief and reconsider god's existence because only that powerful guy on the ultradistant second floor could create such a being of endless wonderment. gianina, my fulcrum, my utopia, my perfect bride. i feel weird, like im in a movie and this is the part where everything is in slow-mo. i am goosebumping all over. my mother-in-law-to-be's tears are contagious. my beloved and i stand before the altar and the riddle of love is finally solved.

500pm: there was a blog post i never finished about how life was a long road and that during our trip, we meet people who walk with us or run with us, sometimes carry us, overtake us, until we all arrive, though at different times, at the one destination we're all headed. jeean and i aren't ready to go home just yet. hands together, we've taken a detour to a road we've never been to before and even if we've been told that this particular path won't be easy to take, but im sure we'll get through it just fine. the i do's have been traded, the bands worn, the kiss displayed.


9 post-wedding highlights:
1. mafia-inspire entourage came into the reception venue in associative music. when it was our turn, my bride sang "if i ain't got you" by alicia keys. some had to be told that it was live.
2. instead of the bouquet, a bunch of roses were thrown at the "hopefuls" and the one without a flower in her hands was the lucky lady to wear the garter.
3. the much-awaited "rock baby rock" clan dance brought the house down, especially with my bride's parents joined in
4. the downed house was crumbled to dust when our supposedly traditional first dance turned into a dance medley of sorts (with a quick hayden-katrina thingy squeezed in), thanks to one hour of perspiration-filled practice of steps aided by youtube.
5. the photobooth didn't get any rest.
6. my father got us all worried when word broke out about his missing wallet, which he found in the pair of pants he left at home.
7. jeean and i came home to falling money and confetti, which became garnish to the kalamay we had to eat.
8. we counted the cash we collected and was quite pleased with the sum (but not thoroughly as we had to turn everything over to my mom for safekeeping).
9. there was a lot of back-and-forth walking in the ponte fino hallway because our immediate families were shacked in five rooms and everyone was in no hurry to slumber. after one tiresome month of preparations and one exciting day of wedding, my wife and i finally get the relaxation we've long longed for.

i could not have wished for a better way to get married or a better woman to get married to. i am a man, i am in love, and goshdarnit, i am very, very happy. very.

up next: parenthood.

better/worse-richer/poorer-sickness/health-death

awakening

every day when i wake up, in the morning or in the afternoon, by myself or roused by external forces, the voices in my head scream in unison in welcoming another day. no matter how bad the previous was, the mere ability to open my eyes and be alive is reason enough to thank the flying spaghetti monster for negotiating my citizenship with sandman and not allowing me to be a permanent resident of somnopolis. there, i could fly, see events unfold in the third person p.o.v. and play tag with nikola tesla in a minefield but i would never trade my real life for subconscious liberties. even more now that i have better things to look forward to post-slumber.

about a month from now, i will start a new life waking up beside the most beautiful woman in time and space. i met her online as jeeanfoxy and i couldnt have helped myself from loving her. since then she's been love to me and a new chapter in our epic love story is just about to begin. on august one, at 4pm, i will be marrying the last piece of my puzzle. the beautiful victory, the elegant ninja, the goddess of all things cute and sexy named ma. gianina sigrid m. muñoz will glide down the aisle and prefix forever with a two-worded, three-lettered sentence. she, my rita hayworth. my life was a prison beyond redemption and she was my escape. she is my charger, my phoenix down, my cosmic cube, my muse incarnate. i was wile e. coyote and she was roadrunner, i get blown into smithereens but she was always worth chasing. now i've captured her. but dont let the pig loose from the pen just yet because that is not all, folks.

sometime in february next year, i will wake up to the living breathing crying laughing smiling peeing pooping proof of our love: our baby, the first of many, the best parts of our dna combined. right now, our child is as small as a peanut, swimming within my wife's wonderful womb. but pretty soon, the kid will be running around and talking and breaking stuff and making us proud. one thing i could guarantee is that child will be loved by the coolest parents ever.

if there is indeed such a thing as karma, then this is probably some sort of reverse karma where i get my humongous load of blessings in advance and im supposed to do something good and big in the future because i dont think ive ever done anything worth all of this. that or i am just one goddarn lucky man...

yep. very lucky indeed.

p.s. theres just too plenty of people to thank for the ongoing preparatory craziness and they dont read my blog anyways so i'll save the acknowledgements for my reception speech where i could tell it to their faces. speaking of faces...

p.p.s. in yo' face, scotteeeeehhh!!!

happy first anniversary, last woman in my life.

jeej,

try as i may, i can not surpass the awesomeness of your post. but what im thinking of right now is this: tomorrow would be a nice day for someone to ask me that question ive always hated being asked because i found it hard to answer until now.

the question: where do you see yourself 15 years from now?

my answer: with jeean, greeting her "happy 16th love anniversary!"

i love you, love. more often than always and longer than forever.

yours only,
jaj.

the spark never dies.

defib

so... last week i resigned from work to get my life back on track. dont get me wrong, there was nothing bad about the job (except maybe for a certain coworker who keeps forgetting to take her antibitchiotics). it was the after hours that drove me crazy. i'd go to my rented room and pretty much stay there until the next day. there wasn't much to do within those green walls of infinite melancholy. in the words of pre-disaster britney, my loneliness was killing me. so many months of enduring the anguish, i packed my shit and went home.

so... here i am now, typing away without worrying about deadlines or overtime. since i left, ive spent just about every day with my beloved superheroin, hanging out, doing silly stuff, eating together, playing with kids, talking, driving around and, most of the time, laughing. every moment of every day, there's always something to laugh about or take a pic of. jeean is just a blast to be with. there is absolutely no one in this polluted floating sphere quite like her. ive never had this much fun with all of my ex-gfs combined. need proof? here:


i love that woman to death. which hopefully is far far away because i want to spend many, many more years with her. i cant wait to have kids with her. we got the chance to act as parents of three gradeschoolers today and learned new ways to achieve happiness. one of which is jump-roping on a trampoline.

p.s. lately ive been pondering about my apparent uselessness to the world. there are people whose jobs affect my well-being, like the farmers and slaughterers for my sustenance, sewers and inkers for my clothing, even the typists who typed the text on shampoo bottles. i owe a lot of my everyday life to them. i wish i had a job like that.
p.p.s. i am so tired today that my slouching is two snaps away from breaking the monobloc chair's backrest.