Throwing Musings

What a rough week. Haven't even gone around to planning the upcoming travel-writing workshop. I come home every night exhausted and anxious, waiting for the other shoe to fall. Just finished making 4 invitation studies, but this only made me miss advertising more. And I have been thinking about making a move, but nothing serious, really. Musing on change is sometimes as good as the act of changing.

hello dolly

I miss Baguio. The last time I went up to our family's house in Maryhurst was 3 years ago, with my sister, on my grandmother's funeral. Uncle Danny (it's really Uncle and Auntie for most Ilocanos) welcomed us with sad eyes and a case of Red Horse Beer. He wasn't really sad that his mother was gone, they all knew it was coming. He was sad because forty years have gone by and he still had made nothing of himself. He was still a postman, just a postman, with seven children. I didn't even know I had two new cousins.

Uncle Danny was the baby of my mother's family, and he was strikingly handsome in his twenties, always seen in his tan leather jacket, zooming down Session Road on a motorbike. All that's gone now. The motorbike sold, the jacket forgotten. There's still a faint impression of that carefree young man somewhere in his smile when he's tipsy and listening to Dolly Parton.

Having spent my early childhood in Baguio, I grew up to country music, hearing the honky-tonk tales of drinking and murder in the house, in the streets and in the jeepneys. Even when I was three, I already had my own opinion on music. Kenny Rogers bored me. Kris Kristofferson was always losing someone, and that was good. Patsy Cline was sweet and constantly made me sleepy. But Dolly Parton. Wow. I would sit up and listen to her songs intensely, not really understanding what they were all about, but was just thrilled at hearing her words. So many words spun into middle-class stories of love and loss, whiskey and shotguns. To this day, her high voice and southern drawl always bring me back to my second floor bedroom in Baguio, sitting on the cold wooden floor, damp from the afternoon fog, with my sister, bundled up in blankets like babies, listening to Dolly sing:

My coat of many colors that my mama made for me,
Made only from rags, but I wore so proudly.
Although we had no money I was rich as I could be
In my coat of many colors, my mama made for me.

I recently got the Dolly Parton tribute CD for my sister, a birthday gift. Artists include Norah Jones, Joan Osbourne, Shania Twain, Sinead O'Connor, Emmylou Harris and Alison Krauss. Listening to it is like being 3 again. But this time, I get the stories. I get the sadness.

erik santos gets sexed-up

Stayed up until 1:30 a.m. the other night just to watch the new Erik Santos video on MYX. And yes, what I've been reading is true. He's mostly shirtless in his video, with a girl on top of him, giving him a ... massage. Where did he learn to look at me (or anyone who was watching the video at 1:30 a.m.) like that? All smolder-y and starving for National Geographic fuckathon. But wait. When did Filipino ballad get sexed up? Martin N. and Gary V. never took their shirts off (there is a GOD!) just to sell records. Even Jay-R, with his fruit fetish on the cover of Cosmo magazine's 69 Bachelors issue (I will never look at apples the same way again: Oooh. Apples. Mmm.), hasn't resorted to such visual seduction to get his music noticed. Must be all the gay talk on Erik. Slap a woman on him, that would make him a MAN. Still, if ever I'm late for work next week, you guys know what I've been doing.

NO! Not that! I'll just be kinikilig in front of my TV at 1 a.m. Darn these young men.