ZEN Bitchin'

As I am writing this, I can feel a distinct throbbing on the inside of my right arm. It is not painful, but it is a physical reminder of what I did last Sunday, Valentine’s day. I have written in my previous post my feelings on (with a delicious experience related to) Valentine’s day. This year, like years past, I wasn’t paying much attention to it much, even though it is difficult to ignore it here in Phnom Penh (again, please refer to said previous post). On Friday night, I was supposed to have dinner with V, my closest-thing-to-a-date, but he begged off because of a pressing family matter. When he suggested that we had dinner on Sunday itself, I almost bristled, and said, “Let’s see”, and left it at that. I didn’t tell him that I have an extreme aversion to going out on a date on V-day itself.

In any case, I wouldn’t have been able to go with him since I had already signed up to join a group of friends to volunteer at Habitat for Humanity as construction workers for a day (which, as it turned out, half a day in our case). This particular activity is somehow connected to  PiNOYs for Change, a group that was formed with the specific purpose of providing support to Noynoy Aquino, but at that time it was not clear to me.

I woke up at 5.30AM on Sunday to make the 7Am trip to Oudong, which is about 35 kilometers from Phnom Penh. I traveled with D because he brought his 2 year-old daughter with him, commando-style (meaning: no nanny). A third of the contingent were already at the site when we arrived. About half an hour later, the last group arrived. After a quick breakfast and a short safety orientation by the construction manager, we donned the required gear (gloves & hard hat for the brick-layers, plus goggles and face masks for the brick-makers) over the suggested outfits (rubber shoes, trousers, long-sleeved shirts) and we were off to work.

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Until now, I still find Valentine’s day to be  a strange holiday. From my childhood I remember that it coincides with Teacher’s day at school, a time when we give flowers and little gifts to our mentors after mass or a short program on the nobility of teachers and teaching as a profession. In high school Valentine’s day is usually when the Junior and Senior Prom is held–a time of serious adolescent anguish for me. In our home, Valentine’s day is usually observed by a somewhat special dinner cooked by my mother, with the night ending with me being tucked in bed a little earlier than usual. My parents are not the romantic, touchy-feely type of couple. Their affection for each other, I’m afraid, is for the most part, Edwardian. They are very decorous, and cautious of revealing too much of themselves. This is probably why I’m such a cold-hearted bitch myself. Of course, I joke. In recent years dinner is still being served, but with the physical improbability of them being able to tuck me in bed early, I now take it upon myself to “conveniently” vanish at the appointed time.

Here in Buddhist Cambodia, where I have seen Valentine’s day for at least 5 years, I’m still surprised at the increasing fervor in which this holiday is being celebrated. I would venture an opinion that it rivals–if not exceeds the celebration of Christmas, in terms of the commercial aspects of this particular holiday. From almost every street corner of Phnom Penh, vendors with flowers, balloons, plush toys and other gifts sprout like mushrooms after a rainy day. Blame this on the increasing purchasing power of the so-called middle class Cambodians, or on the fact that more than half of Cambodia’s population is under the age of 24, even on the youth’s love of anything barang (foreign).

Now, there has never been a Valentine’s day when I had someone to celebrate it with. It always come at at time when I had no lover, or if I had one, we always seemed to fight a week or a few days before that day, to reconcile a few days after, or never. Some of my friends think it’s a deliberate effort on my part, but it’s not. Really. I don’t mind spending for some gifts, silly as some of them might be. Though I’m clearly not the world’s biggest romantic (refer to my Edwardian parents above), I still long for that day when someone who’s not my friend will greet me a happy Valentine’s day with a kiss, or God forbid, a gift of sweets or of fragrance. But there are times when life seems to play a practical joke on me, forcing me to laugh at myself rather than risk being laughed at by others.

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By some twist of fate, the start of the project I recently acquired was postponed, leaving me with a 2-week gap I had no way of filling with other bits of work, having refused a short assignment in the end of January. Another source of mild irritation in this turn of events is the fact that I missed going to Bangkok to meet a dear individual because I expected to be working on Monday. I could only clench my jaws and shake my fist against the sky crying, ‘Why, God?’ Of course, I exaggerate. That instant, two words flashed in my mind: ‘movie marathon’. During this time, I also learned that the American version of ‘Ugly Betty’ has been canceled, and will consequently end its 4-year run in a few weeks. This provided me the impetus to finally get the DVD of ‘Ugly Betty’. I always tried my best to catch it at Star World but I think I managed to watch most of season 1 only. So off I went to my friendly-neighborhood (pirated) DVD-store and promptly got me the first 3 seasons of ‘Ugly Betty’.

America Ferrera as Betty, circa season 4

Towards the end of season 1 a scene tugged at the remaining strings of my heart. In this scene, Betty (America Ferrera) was being prevailed upon by her father, sister, and nephew to forgive her colleague/friend who betrayed Betty’s trust. Frustrated, her elder sister Hilda exclaimed that Betty was too hard on her friends. Betty denied this with alacrity but when her father and nephew agreed with Hilda, she was forced to examine herself if she was indeed being too hard on her friends.

The state of my friendships has been relatively peaceful since the turmoil of the last 2 years. However, lately, I have found myself becoming irritated at some of my friends over the most mundane things. I have increasingly felt that most of the people around me seem to be able to do nothing but fail me in some way or another. This feeling did not help me at all. It, in fact, added to my distress, fueling my desire to avoid company as much as possible, for fear of being hurt or worst, frustrated.

Like Betty I had been told that I’m too hard on my friends. Unlike Betty I did not deny this. On some fundamental level, I know that this is at least partly true. I think, because it takes me a long time to be friends with somebody, I tend to completely give my trust to the few that become my friends. In addition, probably because of my insecurities, I like–no, I need to be reassured that this particular friend deserves my friendship. Because of this, I always tend to subject my friendships (and my friends) to tests and experiments.

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Something remarkable happened to me a couple of days ago. I was logged in Facebook, looking at the wall of status updates of my friends. A name popped up in a friend’s status update comments. A blast from the past. Before I could control myself, I directed a question to her, asking if she, by any chance attended my high school. Turned out that she was indeed the one I thought of. If memory serves me right, she was a transferee from Bacolod, a place that the rest of us that time must have considered exotic, being land-locked Bulakenyos who probably considered Luzon as the only part of the country that mattered.

After this initial contact, she invited me to peruse her profile so I could get in touch with our other classmates. And before the euphoria faded away, I did exactly just that. I stifled a groan when I saw that she had 500+ friends. How was I supposed to get through this list? But about 90 minutes (and a blooming migraine) later, I have seen the many names that populated my young life. However, out of the 30+ names I saw in her profile, I only managed to click about 3 other names.

I have previously written how I felt about my unremarkable years in high school. Of course, when one hears that I graduated from high school at age 14, he or she wouldn’t agree right away that it was an unremarkable 4 years. But to be honest, that’s really how it was. If anything, the only remarkable things in my high school life were how socially inept I were, the sense of alienation that I felt (which never lifted until after my second year at university, and my utter lack of friends. If I were going to use my present definition of friends, I’d say that I only made one true friend in high school. And I never contacted him again since going to Manila a few weeks after graduating from high school. I saw him only 10 years later, by accident, while I was dining with my boyfriend at a restaurant. We were cordial with each other; he seemed excited about a supposed high school reunion that was going to happen in a few months. I feigned excitement when he mentioned the reunion, but I knew in my heart that I couldn’t be bothered to return to a place where I existed virtually invisible–always on the fringes, on the outside looking in the beautiful and popular ones.

Last I heard, J is dead. I remember he had a congenital heart defect. In fact, in our senior year, he got sick and almost died, about the time we had our annual spiritual retreat.

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