A computer on every desktop
It’s finally happened, one of our Gatesian dreams of long-ago to have a computer on every desktop in our home, workgrouped, and with Internet access.
We hadn’t realized it until now. We have our old computer, which we had lugged all the way from Manila when we moved here to Iligan, a battered AMD Duron K6 that has definitely seen better days. We all call it Tootit, Maui’s baby word for computer, he who practically grew up in front of one. Of course, Tootit sits in Maui’s room. Sometime last year my husband brought home his office desktop and began telecommuting. We named his computer Moby, after the whale, a pun on the name of the NGO he works for. Moby sits in our bedroom. When they moved offices and downsized their staff, a left-over computer was hauled over to the house for safekeeping. We dumped it in the guestroom and named it Ahab.
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Ang Lagalag
Hardly anything is on the internet about Samuel Bilibit, the man who was cursed to wander the earth until judgement day. That is about to change. Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome to the blogging world …
In One Basket
Once upon a time, in a house on an island far far away, there lived a young mom with her 9-year old son. He was watching t.v. and she was washing the dishes with her back to him, just a few feet away. It was a very small house.
It was a time when Aga and Dayanara were the “In” couple, and the trailer to their first movie together was being shown, over and over again, on abs-cbn. It was the same segment all the time, a close-up shot of Aga and Dayanara kissing on the beach. As we look in on our mother and son, it was the 3rd time the trailer had been shown since the tv had been turned on, and also the third time that the son had said “I am going to watch this movie.” The mom, for the third time, had made no comment. It was not the kind of movie she was in the habit of watching.
When the trailer was shown a fourth time within the hour and the son again said “I am going to watch this movie,” the young mom could bear it no longer and, exasperated, asked him, “Why do you want to see that movie? So you can learn how to kiss?”
“No,” he said.
*silence*
“I already know how to kiss.”
*more silence*
“It’s just like eating ice cream.”
Thank goodness for melamine plates.
“You see?” our young mom says to her mother-in-law later that week, after having told her about her grandson’s ice cream pronouncement. “It’s things like this that make me want to have just an ‘only’ child.”
“Yes,” she said, “but wouldn’t that be like putting all your eggs in one basket?”
True… our young mother admits. If I were to feed him my dreams. But if he follows his own dream and finds success then we’re both happy. If he doesn’t … well, we’ll eat scrambled eggs. We like scrambled eggs. With cheese.
Twelve years worth of omelettes later our young mother (young at heart, anyway) has lost track of that 9 year old son, and is now raising his kid brother and baby sister. The kid brother likes eggs too. Hardboiled. The baby likes hardboiled egg yolks. They seem to be doing ok.
The “young mother” wonders if her eldest son is still eating scrambled eggs.
He’s young, she says to herself. His heart can take it.
Takuza
Yesterday I asked my husband what exactly was a Takuza*. A Filipino pun on what is commonly known as the Japanese mafia, it is what tagalog males say in reference to their drinking buddies who go home promptly before dinnertime, or immediately after an irate phone call from the missus.
My husband then enumerated his drinking buddies, which include an engineer, a contractor, two minor politicians and a government worker, all of whom played football in college, all of whom are at least twice the size of their wives, all of whom, himself included he admits, are Takuza.
“Takot ka sa akin?” I asked, incredulous.
“It’s not so much being afraid of you,” he said, “than being afraid of what you might do if I offended you terribly.” He said men who have found what they are looking for, their peace, the yang to their yin, the bagoong to their pinakbet, are usually Takuza. Every now and then they might get carried away during a night out with the buddies, but the wife’s voice, even the just the thought of the wife’s voice raised in anger, over the celfone (which is never turned off during a get-together) always reins them in. The last toast is given and drank, chairs scrape away from the table, shoulders are punched playfully. “Takuza ka noh?,” one says to the other and the other replies, “ikaw rin eh.”
“I can’t speak for the other guys, but I believe they’d say pretty much the same thing if you asked them. I don’t want to upset the balance that I’ve found in my life by upsetting you. At the back of my mind there’s this fear that you might take the kids and leave me if I wronged you, and I couldn’t imagine a life without you and the kids.”
“Wow,” was all I could say.
I gave him a kiss and a hug, squishing the baby between us (don’t worry, she likes that), and we went on with the rest of the day. I didn’t tell him then that the thought of leaving has never crossed my mind (of course I won’t tell him that, and take away my primary psychological advantage?). I also didn’t tell him that he just wrote my blog for me.
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*Takot Sa Asawa, in English “Afraid of One’s Wife”
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