i.i am still sane!

on the 5th day of the brownout*, i was singing josh groban songs in the middle of the night. my mother thought i was losing my sanity, so she actually entertained the thought of having me see a psychiatrist.

switch topic.

Reming ravaged Albay so we had to do a mini-exodus to escape from whatever is left of our province. the experience was rather complex and forgettable, too depressing that i actually chose not to remember anything, if not evreything. for one it was terrifying. terrifying because it made us fear for our lives. terrifying because it made us pause in the middle of the struggle for existential survival and wonder "what will happen to us?"

that was exactly my question when the day after the storm, i had to go to the city proper to buy food. i wondered what would ever happen to us when i looked at all the electricity wires dangling on the skeletal trees, some sprawled along the street, electric posts lying on the asphalt like dead logs, houses without roofs, empty city streets, men and women walking by the road like soul-sucked zombies. it made me think about the other day, when everyone thought that we knew our city, we knew what it once was and we knew what it will be in the future. but the storm changed everything.

our city leader is sitting inside his office like a retarded toad. people are dying and he seems too clueless to even blink about anything.

-=oOo=-

when i went to the centro to buy chunkee corned beef, i saw this padyak driver beside me. he had bruises everywhere, teary-eyed and he was fondling a pouch for coins. he was buying three eggs, and upon realization that his money wasn't enough, he opted to buy just one. and to think he had three children and a wife waiting at his small padyak carriage nearby.

the drama did not end with the egg anecdote. i was quite busy looking for commodities inside this decent store in Quinale [our mini-supermarket]. there were noodles, sacks of rice and all the things you could see in relief goods. i was never good at shopping for things so i opted to buy two packs of stick-O[famished]. i couldn't help overhearing the store-owner's conversations with a customer she seemed to know. she said that the night of the typhoon, their house was washed away literally by a large mass of water from a nearby river. through the raging winds they ran to a relative at the other street and asked for help. surprisingly their reltaive had his house also blown away, so they took a motorized tricycle and headed for a motel 2 kilometers away. she said they nearly died when they tried to cross a bridge that collapsed rigght after they reached the other end. the lady, near tears, said that that incident changed her life forever.

"bumagyo di ba?hindi ka tataas ng presyo?" her friend asked.

"hindi na. malaking tubo na na buhay pa ako ngayon."

how come i didn't have a special stick-o discount.

-=oOo=-

it's a pity i wasn't able to contact lorenz after Reming. being my most trusted school photographer, i needed his shutterbug bravura to take pictures of the "TNHS" ruins. earlier on the day after Reming, i met Mr.E.Borromeo waiting for a tricycle near the ravaged LCC Mall. he said classes would be suspended indefinitively. i just kept silent in jubilation. he showed me pictures of the destruction in the school's digital camera[surprisingly, we do have our own digicam].well, i can't make a justifiable reaction since the LCD screen was too small to give me much needed details[hehe] but with the looks of it, tabaco national high school is gasping[for renovations and donations]. too bad, this means that all the beautifcation efforts of the present principal are just useless. one typhoon came. 6000 goals wasted.

*nostalgia* i saw jeremiah heading towards kevin's house. so i invited him to go "wreck seeing" in TNHS. i am too depressed to even try thinking of describing what i saw. it wasn't the same school i have been attending for the last 3 years of my life. perhaps there is a reason for all this wreckage. but right now, i still don't know what it is.

-=oOo=-

i doubt whether i can still continue feeding this blog with posts. perhaps in college. that would be three months from now.

ii. somnambolism with ativan

Labels: Insanity, Lorenz's Pics, Typhoon Reming