don't you know how garlic butter smells like?

somehow, i've manage to survive the UP dorm system my entire college life and half of my law school life. while i've learned to live with communal bathrooms, the lack of running hot water, incessant chattering day and night, and beady eyes checking out how my current boyfriend looks like, i cannot have a difficult time accepting the fact that cheap - and relatively acceptable accommodations - come with hormonally challenged old ladies who do nothing but exchange gossip and throw away garlic butter that does not belong to them.

you might find me cheap, pathetic even, to be ranting about someone throwing away my garlic butter. but when you used your last money to buy it one day from pan de manila, and was terribly looking forward to eating it with hot steaming pan de sal after a particularly long day, you can't helped but be ticked off upon finding that someone has thrown away your dinner, or what would have been a big part of your dinner.

still believing in the good nature of people in the dorm, i actually spent almost five minutes looking for it in the overcrowded refrigerator. among other things, i found a bottle of gin, a paper cup of what was probably soda ten weeks ago from wendy's, and eggs that seem to have grown into chicks already in the ref but not my garlic butter. a middle-aged lady approached me, asking what i was looking for, and i said, well, i couldn't find my garlic butter.

apparently, someone cleaned out the ref over the weekend (clearly missing the mutated soda, hrmph!) and upon smelling the contents, probably thought that since my butter smelled unlike any butter she has seen inhaled before, threw my butter along with other not-so-right-smelling things that were infesting our wing's refrigerator.

i couldn't help it. i whined. "maybe she didn't know garlic butter was supposed to smell that way. she shouldn't have messed with it in the first place."

two days later, i was actually over it, payday having arrived and the possibility of buying another tub of garlic butter has presented itself once more. however, this morning, my roommate (wilma, you ALL know her, right?) told me that some people were chatting about my garlic butter last night. apparently, they were saying that if it were garlic butter i should have labeled it (clearly they don't know how to read the label on the container, duh.) and written "do not touch" across the cover (last time i checked my ms. manners, no one was supposed to touch what clearly did not belong to you.)

oh well. i've got another semester to go in that place. i don't know where they'll be next year, or five years after that but i know where i'll be:

i'll be where garlic butter tubs don't disappear from refrigerators.

handcuffs and the color yellow

i get a natural high when appearing in court while wearing a suit and stilettos, with my hair neatly pulled back in a low ponytail and my power bag slung carelessly over my shoulder. call it my ally mcbeal complex. something about being all dressed-up in a world where mostly male lawyers dominate gives me a kick that no shopping trip can ever give.

no matter how hot that courtroom is, you'd feel like breezing in. you tend to sit up straighter, and smiles are somewhat brighter than usual. you approach the clerk of court, introduce yourself, and ask if the opposing counsel is present already. you sit and wait for the roll call, where you stand and blurt out, "law intern rosa xxxxxxxxxx, for the defendant, appearing under the direct control and supervision of the up college of law office of legal aid and my supervising lawyer atty. roque, we are ready, your honor."

in family court, you usually get lucky. the room is filled with overpaid lawyers in barongs or suits, who opt for postponements, owing to one reason or another. their clients are generally pretty, sweet-smelling, and quite young ladies in their 30s or 40s, or handsome, rich powerbrokers, who want nothing but an annulment. sometimes, you come across custody battles, still between rich, beautiful people. more often than not, you're the one with the client who's most shabbily dressed, the client who had to scrimp and save to make it to the hearing that day.

today, however, i had to venture out of my 2 favorite courtrooms, rtc 106 and 84 in qc, and found myself in rtc 124, caloocan. while the building was new, the atmosphere really was the same. and unlike before where i pretty much dealt with people who just want out of a bad marriage, today's case was a criminal case for libel.

in my best, most unlegalistic tagalog, i was trying to explain something to my witness when a horde of people started coming in. i made nothing of the policeman who entered, probably cause i wasn't driving and so my license would be, for the meantime, be safe in my wallet, but then the first two rows began being filled up with men in yellow.

forget what they show on television where prisoners are men whose heads are shaved wearing orange with a big P at the bag. in the philippines, they wear bright yellow shirts, and they are handcuffed to one another.

at first, i tried to make nothing of it. if i want to be in litigation, men in yellow and handcuffs shouldn't intimidate me, right? however, having gone through the revised penal code only the night before, crimes began running through my head.

and not your ordinary crimes, mind you, the heinous ones.

did that guy murder someone? is the one he's cuffed to a rapist? what about that other guy?

it was not long before i had to get out of that room. quickly.

forget poise. forget confidence and charm and appeal. ally mcbeal never had to sit five inches away from a probable murderer.

school snob

gary and i are friends.
gary and i get along. sometimes.
gary and i have the greatest conversations which means that we sometimes spend an inordinate amount of time chatting over the phone or over potato fritters at the tent.

gary and i generally agree, and i'd like to think that since he likes hanging out with me so much (he!he!) that he actually loves my company like anything, but the moment i begin to say anything about schools, colleges, universities, and diplomas in general, he looks at me weirdly and begins to shake his head in that weird way of his. his voice becomes high-pitched, and he cannot help but squint at me.

he believes i'm pretty illogical.

see, i've always been a school snob. my "checklist" even includes an item indicating where i prefer my future husband to have graduated from. and no matter how crappy the educational system sometimes get, i still believe in the power of the diploma.

come on. no matter what you say, with all things being equal, you would hire a UP law graduate over, say, a graduate from the harvardian school of laguna, right?

so i think gary's a bit scared. i'm watching the la salle-feu game tomorrow.

guess who i'm cheering for.

yeah. i'm a school snob.

random tidbits:

* my brother started blogging. i remember him writing a very short story when we were kids, bottles of beer, then leaving it out for everyone to ready. by the end of the day, everyone was hooked (it didn't have a proper end) but since he didn't admit he was the one who wrote it, we all ended up gushing about it while wondering about how it ended. right after he got stabbed and before the doctors decided whether to go on with a heart-bypass or not, he told me wrote bottles of beer. unfortunately, he couldn't remember how he wanted to end it.

needless to say, he writes better, way better, than i do.

* i'm glad feu won, but not that mac cardona lost out to arwin santos. since feu won, i've a date to watch the finals at araneta this thursday.

while my dear MISGUIDED friend believes that feu will win, i've got my money on mac and the boys. arwin's running on the high being mvp brought him, and mac was on a slump. ty tang's got a lot of promise, and yeo was just not THAT fueled yet, owing probably the the lack of tenorio to make his adrenaline run like mad. feu may have won 3rd place in cheering (in that absolutely weird "let me look like the people who do ice sledding/ racing whatever cheerleading costume) and 1st place last year, but i do love my dear mac cardona and i've got my bets on him.

* ara, i've got a plan. email you later.

today i made a not-so-significant-but-still-a-contribution-nonetheless to our fiscal problems.

i got caught by an mmda.

i didn't bribe, although i was itching to do so.
i didn't cry, only because i was not capable of doing so.
i didn't run, there was a traffic light preventing me from doing so.

my hands shook while i texted a friend about what happened. still, i waited patiently inside my car as the traffic enforcer rattled on and on while writing my ticket.

calmly, i hope, i asked him if my license would not be confiscated and if all i had to do was pay the ticket at the nearest metrobank branch.

he nodded.

ten minutes later, i had my license, plus a ticket, and was on my way back to where i was supposed to go.

and at 12 noon, i made my way to a metrobank branch and made my P500 contribution to the mmda budget.

all in a day's work.