and i'm off!

another weekend, another trip.

leaving at 4:30 p.m. later. i just have to make the trip to DepEd Mandaluyong again to pick something up, wrap up thesis revisions, and make sure announcements are sent off to students regarding their practicum interviews. after that, i'm going to have another rocking weekend, this time a road trip, that'll hopefully end in nueva ecija on halloween where i'll be helping a friend out by judging a costume party and where i'll be doing my good apo duties by staying in hot sticky cemetery for an entire day.

yay!yay!yay!

my weekend rocked

so what if i had a million things pending? i wasn't about to let that get in the way of a really rocking weekend.

my weekend started friday evening and ended early monday evening. i ate huge amounts of food, walked a whole lot, tried -- and failed miserably - to shop within my means, watched a cabaret show, resisted my aunt's prodding to watch banana/pingpong/open-the-bottle-with-your-p***y show, got a 2-hour full-body massage, got a one-hour body massage, and got lost in the middle of a market with absolutely zero idea on how to get back to where we lived.

still.

it was fun.

it was exhilirating.

and ... it was also then that i realized how much jay cares. half an hour before i was supposed to start my rocking weekend, he surprised me by showing up at my office just to say goodbye and take care.

you don't get that very often. but i do.

i've got a thousand and one things on my checklist, most of which i have to check off before the end of the month. there's the papers i have to check, my mom's checking account to balance, letters to send to DepEd mandaluyong and three public schools, all of which are characteristically uncooperative. there's also the thesis to polish like crazy for submission to the panel, and the clothes and other stuff i have to pack so that i can hold a garage sale in my brother's office in laguna before the sembreak ends. the books and stuff from last semester are still in the backseat of spike which i would definitely have to clear before i start dumping new stuff i'll be accumulating for the second semester.

and i thought that the end of october means sembreak.

wrong. it means catching up.

which brings me again to another list. i have to catch up with people from work re: our second semester practicum sites. i have to catch up with work friends who have almost forgotten about me since i always ditch their gimmicks (which i may end up doing yet again on our planned galera trip). i have to catch up with my best friend WHO IS PREGNANT, yay!yay!yay! i have to catch up with two super cool college friends who i lost touch with after shifting but found through the most serindipitous of circumstances.

and in between all this catching up, guess who i haven't seen for 8 days.

well it ain't over till it's over

one day, the powers that be were having a little tete-a-tete and decided to ponder on the faith of rosa.

"did you know that she's already in fourth year law?" hissed one evil power that be to another.

"uh-huh. and she told me the other day that she recently met 'the one'" said the second.

the third shook its head, "tragic, isn't it? she's supposed to be 26, with a single ovary, and her parents are away figuring out the future of their marriage. so why then is she receiving all this good luck?"

the first two nodded their heads in agreement. the turn of events in rosa's life was definitely not the way they planned things for her.

so they first decided to kill her slowly with three weeks of pure purgatory unbliss. all five teachers in law school decided to give exams. one even decided to throw two moot court presentations in the melee. another one decided that the important things he stressed in class weren't that important so he included inane question on the closure of roads by local governments.

rosa, stressed as she was, tried to put up a brave front. she continued to blog, her only release, and go out with "the one", justifying it as a sanity break, and tried to plod her way to the 18th which was the original end of the suffering.

the three evil powers that be were enraged even further! how can this girl withstand all that torture? so they decided to throw in thesis deadlines for good measure. and if that wasn't enough, they were going to put in a major conflict between two thesis panelists, one her adviser and the other one the assistant dean, in the hope that the tug-of-war would eventually tear her apart.

will she survive? can she survive?

to be continued...

surprise!

not the good kind this time around.

imagine yourself after ...
one morning meeting;
two meetings you forgot about;
breaking out into cold sweat after your chest started feeling like a heavy weight was placed on top of it and you can't breathe, and how it felt like this the entire afternoon;
conducting the direct examination in moot court in a blazer with lining and a malfunctioning aircon.

definitely, you wouldn't be at your prettiest. i'd even venture as far as saying you're almost ugly.

so even if you've been dying to meet a family member, be introduced to one, and be recognized as "the girlfriend", under the circumstances, you'd just cringe. or you could die.

i died.

figuratively, of course. although i'd rather think i'm just a ghost of the person i was yesterday.

he told me to meet him after my moot court. i thought that shouldn't be a problem until i saw that he was with his GORGEOUS sister who was in this GORGEOUS gown and looked AMAZING in full make-up and in spite of the fact that the wedding was at three and it was 1030 already, still looked AS FRESH AS A DAISY.

i felt like a maid compared to her. i felt smelly and shiny and short and effing ugly. it didn't help that i was in all black, which happened to be the color the waitresses at the pen wear. i was pangit pangit pangit.

so i just sat there, smiling like a cheshire cat all the time plotting in mind exactly how to give jay a piece of my mind about the evil little surprise he had of introducing me to his sister without warning.

then the bigger surprise came. his aunt passed away, barely a week after his cousin, the son of the same aunt, died of a heart attack at 42.

surprise.

i know i promised to stay in one lane but ...

la salle guy -- incidentally he has a name, jay -- is absolutely fearful of the way i drive. he's under the mistaken impression that one day i will kill a whole lot of people -- if i don't kill myself first -- with the way i weave from one lane to the other while driving. he has called me countless of names. so while i am absolutely positive that he loves me, i am also sure that this is one thing about me that he hates.

being the amazing driver he is, he's taken up the challenge to help me become a better driver. lesson one, according to him, is to learn how to stick to one lane and be patient. a good driver is never impatient, so unless i master that trick, i'll never be a good driver.

so for the last couple of days i've been trying to stick to one lane. it's quite easy sometimes especially since traffic has progressively gone from bad to worse. i stick to one lane and concentrate on learning the words to the different songs on my favorite cd.

but last night, *sigh* the traffic gods set a huge temptation before me. after honking goodbye to jay who turned at bohol avenue, i went down timog and saw, after i made the right turn to edsa a wide expanse of beautiful, almost car free, road.

seatbelt, check.
side mirrors properly positioned, check.
rear view mirror properly positioned, check.
seat comfortably positioned, check.
brakes, check.
jay (who called right after he saw me go straight down timog instead of turning at bohol and said goodbye already and reminded me to be careful going home and to text him the moment i've parked the car inside the garage) nowhere in sight, check check check.

so off i went. edsa, at its widest, is around four lanes (not including the yellow lanes). there were cars here and there but i happily weaved from one lane to the other, braking only when necessary. spike isn't the fastest thing on the planet with his 1.3 engine, what more if he's loaded with boxes of shoes, readings, and clothes i'm taking home for the sembreak, but i milked him for all he's worth. edsa, at 120 kph, is the closest thing to perfect bliss.

then my phone rang.

j: one lane lang pala, ha.
r: *gulp* oo. teka, nasaan ka?
j: kala ko ba mabait ka na magmaneho
r: *double gulp* maluwag edsa, eh. sayang naman. nasaan ka.
j: basta. in-overtakean mo lang naman ako sa cubao.

so for a minute or so, it was him chiding me for my lane switching and me trying to make excuses. it was also the minute or so that i was stuck behind a painfully slow truck but couldn't switch lanes, well, because i'd promised him i wouldn't switch lanes.

after a while he honked, passed by my right side, and went up ortigas flyover and i went my merry way down edsa again. i checked all mirrors, making sure he wouldn't pop up behind me again, and assured that he's not going to surprise me a second time, happily went back to lane switching all the way home.

and i feel like a sunsilk commercial

familiar with the sunsilk tagline "paganda ng paganda"?

that's how my life feels like right now. it's hell week, yes. it's been quite hellish in terms of tasks to accomplish the last three weeks, and it's not going to end until the 20th but who cares. my life is a sunsilk commercial.

first there was la salle guy on october 4.

then the thesis sort of wrote itself. it got partial approvals from the three people who read it, subject to some additions (the perspective was too western). it will be defended on november 17. the boss promised me that she'd stick by me through the entire defense, especially since there are some iffy things in the paper which may not fly (like the contextual analysis thingee which i don't really understand but she asked me to use). that's real good. she's usually "safe" when it comes to thesis defenses, opting to allow her mentee to sink or float. this promise is most definitely good.

third, i teased my aunt into taking me to a vacation. she agreed and if i fix everything to her liking, i'll get to see nic real soon, in the flesh. (provided he doesn't fly off somewhere!)

so, life is a sunsilk commercial. it's all good.

-oOo-

belated happy birthday to my favorite blogger of all time.

-oOo-

guess who showed up last night.

la salle guy.

no warning, no hey-i'll-be-driving-to-manila-so-you-better-make-time-for-me-cause-it's-the-only-free-time-i've-got-so-you've-got-to-deal-with-it-and-i-don't-care-if-you-have-a-really-tough-locgov-exam-the-following-day message to make sure i'll be free, no nothing.

just him and a text telling me that contrary to the message i had sent him a while ago that he was a hundred kilometers away, he was actually a few meters away from where i was.

i replied, really?

he said, yup, your car is parked beside a pick-up.

i swooned a little, but not after i hastily threw on clothes and looked into the mirror to make sure that my face wasn't shiny or that my hair was sticking out in the weirdest directions.

as with all happy bubbles, someone has to just burst them so wilma, my roommate, said, "di naman ikaw pinuntahan niya, eh. pumunta siya dito para dun sa patay. nagkataon lang na napadaan siya." for her, surprise visits which don't have you as the primary object of the visit (for example her boyfriend, who lives in san pablo, goes to manila to purchase stuff for his store so whenever he drops by on fridays she's not happy at all cause she feels she was just a side trip) don't count. for her, a side trip is a side trip. extra ka lang.

i don't care. la salle guy was there, in the flesh, last night and that's all that matters to me.

of course, there's locgov exam tonight. that also matters. i better hustle now.

resu

resu is one of the terms some people back in high school coined up, together with batibot, jugjug, hunger, and killer*

read resu in reverse and you'd realize it's one of the most awful things you can say about a person.

you can accuse a man of cheating on his girl and he wouldn't mind. you can tell him that you don't really enjoy his company and would rather watch someone milk a goat with his mouth in fear factor and he wouldn't mind. in fact, in some twisted sense, he'd find you hard to get and begin declaring undying love for you. but accuse a man of being a user, well, that's a different story altogether.

a post i wrote yesterday had allusions to people i know in real life and one of them happened to read the blog yesterday. he sent an SMS, miffed at what i wrote about him. although he had told me countless times in the past how writing is made better by one's unabashed honesty in writing, it doesn't count when your confession is about how you feel about someone who is your friend.

i've had similar foot in mouth situations before and i've apologized (and paid dearly) for what i've written in this blog more than once. nic told me that sometimes, that's the difficulty with blogging. people read it, and if they don't see it the way you do, or fail to understand what you were trying to say, no amount of explanation can ever fix things.

so basically, i've called him a user and he resented it. i guess i would too. i apologized, but as with being the offender, you are stuck with waiting as the other person decides whether or not to forgive you.

*killer, for atchay killer, was what they called this guy in our batch. funny how i've always known him as killer and how i found out only during graduation that his real name was david.

-oOo-

on a lighter note, the traffic in ortigas these days is just horrible. i don't know why some people believe that closing off roads and making one way streets out of other roads will facilitate traffic. it doesn't.

i long for the day that bayani fernando actually sits behind the wheel of a car during rush hour and see for himself how his rerouting scheme has made things more difficult both for motorists and pedestrians.

-oOo-

on a cheery note --

i MAY finally get to defend my thesis on the 21st.

wow. finally finally finally. an MA in Liberal Education. (don't ask me what it means. somewhere along the way, i forgot!)

keep your fingers crossed!

one big fight

no, this is not an ateneo basketball post (i rooted for la salle, for obvious reasons).

it's about how we fought in the middle of what should have been the honeymoon stage of the relationship. it's about the raised eyebrows of people who knew about the fight and were asking where a relationship with a fight on day 7 is headed for.

it's about how i finally figured out what they mean when they say you're in a relationship with an adult.

see, most of what i know about relationships i learned from sweet dreams. and if you were a teen in the 80's and early 90's, you probably know what i'm talking about. the storyline is fairly basic, girl meets boy, boy meets girl, they like each other, they have one big fight where they realize they LOVE each other, then they live happily ever after. so, i went through most of high school, and college, and even work relationships that way.

believe me, it's all crap. real life never works out that way. real life is falling in major like with checklist guy and realizing that you aren't, and will never be, his checklist girl. real life is falling for someone who most probably likes the fact that you drive a cool car and willing to share it more than he likes you. real life is having someone really in love with you but never really finding it in you to stick it out with him and make a relationship out of it.

and real life is learning to sit down, listen, and realize that you've got it all wrong. i've always thought that a mature relationship had to do with the intensity of one's feelings. yesterday, as i was sitting with him in front steps of my house, i learned that maturity has nothing to do with flowers on your desk or weekly gifts. it has nothing to do with the passion with which you entered the relationship. and it has absolutely no positive correlation with the number of text messages bearing "i love you".

i learned the hard way. i learned it through a fight that may have easily led to goodbye's had a good friend not been there with me to pull the cellphone out of my hand before i sent the first blow that might have caused a still-fragile relationship to fall down.

so we had our one big fight. but instead of simply running back to each other's arms like the way they do it in books, he came to my house (yummy mushroomburgers and a fresh buko pie in hand), talked to me about what went wrong, and assured me that this may not be the smoothest ride life has to offer, but we are going to give it our best shot.

-oOo-

admit it. wendell ramos is hot.

wendell ramos in bubble gang was hot. wendell ramos in those bench posters was hot. wendell ramos, no matter where you find him, is hot.

but -- wendell ramos in person is HOTTER.

secret lang 'to, ha. hulaan mo kung sino ang may autograph niya? ako ako ako! mabait yung waiter sa italliani's at nautusan naming humingi ng autograph para sa akin.

two down, three to go

i've been counting down like crazy for final exams, thesis, and other requirements to be done and over with. a couple of hours ago, tax finals squeezed my brain out of what little life was left in it. hopefully i get some real sleep tonight (not half hunched in the corner of my bed hoping that the awkward position will force me to wake up in the middle of the night), after having dinner with a good friend.

still, no la salle guy tonight though. he's out in tagaytay. WITHOUT me. exams and thesis on my part, and harvest season on his, makes the schedule just a wee bit awry these days.

can we still be friends?

had lunch with a new-old* friend today. for a grand total of a month or so, new-old friend rocked my world. forget law school and work and deadlines. if i had a spare minute, i'd spend it with him.

being the girl, i poured heart and soul and what-have-you. forget what i learned about being pakipot, it was not the time nor the place to emulate maria clara. i was wrong (obviously) and scared him till he ran for cover and thought i was weird and all that. can i just say that it was like a jennifer paige song:

Girl meets boys, girl goes crazy
Boy backs away, she gets her heart broken
No words are spoken
Boy came backs and acts
As if everything is cool
Soon she's got him back on a pedestal
She only sees what she wants to see
Love is blind, love is so misleading

anyway, that's done and over with now. found la salle guy, moved on, am ecstatic like crazy, and i finally saw him again after a while.

can we be friends? can i share with this person intimate details of my life? wouldn't it be weird if i told him how la salle guy invited me a while ago for an event TWO MONTHS AWAY?

it definitely feels awkward. it actually feels weird.

*translation: new, because we've known each other for less than half a year, and old, because i think we're not at that stage where we'd hardly see each other anymore except if and when we bump accidentally into each other or we make a huge effort to make time to have coffee or something like that

-oOo-

la salle guy texted asking me what i'd be doing on december 4.

wow. that's almost two months away. i don't even know what i'll be doing next month.

turns out he wants me to go with him to a christmas party in fontana that day.

that's a biggie. two months. two whole months away. he can see me and him together two months from now.

how adorable is that?

it's been 3 days and 15 hours.

it happened in the middle of finalizing my thesis final draft, preparing for moot court, and law school exams.

it took place at 2 in the morning at coutry waffle after a long meeting with law school classmates and an even longer day at the office.

i didn't think, i didn't process, i didn't even analyze. it just felt right.

it came at the right moment. it came as a surprise, but a welcome one. it was too soon, but time does not guarantee anything.

when i went home and went to bed, i sent short little happy SMS to two people who'd be happy with the news -- my best friend and a great guy who just passed the GMAT with a whopping score of 700 who goes by the name of nic.

with other relationships you feel the need to broadcast it to the world. you feel you need their validation over the leap you have just taken. you want them to be happy for you so you create so much noise about it. you create an event out of it, hoping that the event will be enough to sustain you through the rough spots.

with this one, i felt happy but with a wave of calmness that i have never felt before. i felt i've come home.

read

shows you that there's hope for all of us just yet.

it's all about him
so if this will bother you stop reading right now

so can i gush?

can i tell you how immediately after lunch sunday he rushed over to manila (sunday afternoon traffic at the north luzon expressway and all) so that we could spend part of the weekend together? and how he didn't complain when the meeting place changed from rockwell to UP to starbucks madison all within three hours?

can i tell you how he calls -- right before class at six, or first thing in the morning, or right before going to bed -- just so that we can hear each other's voices? last night, while i was driving home from UP to BF, he called right after his meeting and when he found out that we were both driving, he kept me on the phone until i got home and he knew i was safe already.

and can i tell you that sometimes, no most of the time, he rocks my world?

it's too soon, i know (it's been three weeks only) and maybe, as before, i'm jumping without looking again. maybe i should play it cool and pretend to not care. maybe instead of thinking about how nice it is when we're together i should concentrate on upcoming exams and deadlines. maybe i should heed my brother's warning about how men will go all out to win you and stop right in the middle of it to see if you're hooked, and when you are, like a drug dealer, make life a wee bit difficult for you by withholding the things that you have so gotten used to.

but when you've found someone you can laugh with at eleven in the evening when it's brownout at home and you're sitting outside your house while he's a hundred kilometers away from you, you don't really think anymore. you enjoy the moment. when you've found someone who inspires you to fix both your life (especially when you haven't planned beyond the bar exam in september 2005) and your room (he's so OC you felt ashamed when he fixed the junk you've had in the backseat of your car for the longest time), you tell yourself that to hell with everything, this is a person i wouldn't mind spending the rest of my life with. of course, there's a bit of a problem though: he still has to feel the same way.

so, if i gush, forgive me. forgive me if we're chatting and all i can mention is his name and what he's done in the last 24 hours and how he's "the one".

and if i walk around with my head in the clouds and with a goofy grin in my face, don't try to snap your fingers in front of my eyes just to bring me back down to earth. cloud 9 is nice, and although i'd love to share a small spot for you, i'm reserving the space beside me for him for the meantime.

my name is rosa, and i'm addicted to love.

say hi.

-oOo-

what is it with me a la salle people?
same school, different boy

never mind that la salle lost in the big game. at least la salle has this amazing dude for an alumna.

go on. read his blog.

what doesn't kill you will only make you stronger

right now, i am so believing that line.

ask me again after october 18. that is, if i'm still alive by then.

-oOo-

i didn't know her yet then but i hated her.

i hated how i knew she was smarter than me.

i hated how i knew she was more competent than me.

i hated her cause i knew she hated me.

if looks could kill, it would've simply been a matter of who sent the first evil glance.

but things change and time passes and people learn to be friends.

and we learned to be friends. we found out that we both liked v-cut and other potato chips, super special siopao and mango juice, and maxibon. we realized that we both had rebellious streaks and that somehow, our working styles compliment each other.

and i learned that in the middle of the night when you've just broken up with your long time boyfriend, you don't need another simpering girlfriend who'd probably give you lines that may make you feel better but don't really work. you realize you need a vanessa who will tell you to pick yourself up, concentrate on working on the thesis, and warn you of the possible implications of you breaking down just right about now.

it's her birthday today. i rarely make good friends of girls but this girl is one of the bestest girl friends one can ask for.

happy birthday, potpot!