25 Random Things

(Cross-posted from Facebook)

1. I look Chinese, my dad is Chinese, my titas are superChinese, but I can’t speak a word of Chinese. Not a word. And I feel bad when I have to apologize that I can’t speak Chinese, say, to a waiter or to a fellow student recruiting me to a Chinese society. We used to live in Fairview, and my parents couldn’t find a Chinese grade school that was nearby. So there.

2. From grade school to college, my friends’ and my fave pastime was listing teachers’ mispronunciations and grammar gaffes. My all-time fave: an English teacher’s insistence that the correct S-V agreement is “Some of the marbles IS on the table” because “some” is “collective” and therefore singular.

3. I was a perfect student in appearance only. I used to pay a fellow classmate to do my arts and crafts projects. And I’ve participated in various and ingenious kinds of “cooperative learning.”

4. I think I had my first boycrush in the 6th Grade. Heehee. But I had no memorable crushes in high school coz my classmates were kinda all nerdy with their Magic Cards.

5. My favorite word in the English dictionary is REPRESENTATION. In Tagalog, it’s gotta be CHIMAY, or chims.

6. As a student, I used to give tikoy (a Chinese New Year cake) to the teachers whom I thought may not give me an “A”. My friend Joey teased me mercilessly about this.

7. I took figure skating classes as a teen. And my coach said I was graceful and had good form.

8. I know gymnastics—its history, its stars, its politics, its judging system. I used to be part of a gymnastics tape trading club, and I have accumulated over 500 VHS tapes of gymnastics meets from the 70s to the 00s. I know the names of all the skills and can calculate routine start values.

9. A few years ago, I met this guy who was a former gymnast. And he took me to my first gymnastics class. I had a crush on him and wanted to impress him. The day ended with me crashing on the parallel bars and having two big bruises in my upper arms. I swear that was why we didn’t end up boyfriends.

10. During our Comm Roast, I won the Boy Abunda Award for biggest gossip.

11. I realize this list is becoming very gay.

12. Is it just me or are weddings and engagements bittersweet? I sometimes feel like I’m losing a friend when I see them get hitched.

13. My brother does not look like me. At all. I used to wonder whether I (or he) was adopted until I saw our birth certificates. But yeah, I know the Chinese can fake documents (cf Beijing gymnastics controversy).

14. I sometimes miss corporate life. I miss my cube, with the special furniture Tet picked out for me. I miss the people—way nicer than academics. And I miss seeing celebrities. Haha.

15. Yeah, I know she’s J, but I loved Angel Locsin. I still remember when I was introduced to her, and she was so nice and chatty. And I was superaffected when she moved to ABS.

16. To get my creatives team to work overtime, I used to buy them Bread Talk.

17. I was looking forward to working with Roger Silverstone when he died three months before I arrived at LSE.

18. I am fixated with tanning. My self-esteem is low when I’m pale. Curiously, I’ve developed my best tans in Europe than in Islands Philippines. Jet agrees with me that the sun is different there from here. There I am able to tan golden-brown as opposed to here when I burn and turn red-pink.

19. But no one has agreed with me yet that the sky is bluer in England than anywhere else in the world.

20. I think Montreal has the highest ratio of beautiful people per square meter than all the cities I’ve been to. I look forward to visiting again.

21. One of my proudest moments: My LSE classmate from Los Angeles was working on her dissertation on the Make Poverty History humanitarian ads. She needed someone to identify all the celebrities in the ad. And of all of us there, she picked the chinky-eyed Filipino to help her with this entertainment-geek task.

22. One of my most shameful moments: My UK supervisors were here in the Philippines. And taking a break from our fieldwork in Los Banos, we stopped to buy fruit from a fruit stand along the highway. Mirca pointed to a citrus-y fruit and asked me what it was. I said that it was calamansi, and Danny corrected me and said that it was a dalandan. I also failed to identify a chico and didn’t know what a mangosteen was.

23. Mirca asked me what I knew about Siargao as well, and I said, “Isn’t that up north?”

24. They also asked me when EDSA was built, what a yema ball is made of, why all cabs are tuned to Energy FM, why Filipinos like old songs, whether I’ve flown on chartered plane (“the best way to see the islands!”), what the choi in “kung hei fat choi” and Choi Garden means, etc. And with how I answered (or not), they now know I’m a ditzy geek.

25. I think hospitality is the most important virtue of all. More than honesty or justice or courage or even wisdom. In all that I do, with all the people I meet, I try to be as welcoming and open and caring as I can be. And I’d like to think I host dinners and parties and events pretty well