The Incontinence of the Skies

The steel skies have been pouring out all its might all week. It is as though the clouds have been holding pissing contests this week; the cloud that pisses the longest and with the most “piss” wins. Hence the spectacular showers and gusts of water from the polluted seas, and the frustrating traffic jams during the early morning and late afternoon rush. Funny how the clouds have the most perfect timing that causes the greatest inconvenience to the inhabitants of the metropolis. Now, it is early morning, maybe just past midnight, and I listen to the forceful splatter of water onto plants, concrete, and steel. Some people still refer this to “it's raining cats and dogs.” Some people say that heaven is shedding copious tears, weeping over the most heartbreaking sorrows. I prefer to be a jerk and name it, “the incontinence of the skies.” 

The never ending downpour leaves umbrellas, windbreakers, closed shoes, or even vinyl raincoats useless. People get around cold and wet and miserable. Damp socks squish inside waterlogged sneakers or hammertime feet get uglier by the second in slippery flip flops meant for torrid summers. Umbrellas get broken when the owner needs it most. Windbreakers get soaked and heavy and useless. Every canopy, bus stop, waiting shed is maximized at this time, packed with people trying to wait out the fierce gusts of water and air.

Students like me look up to the heavens, imploring for the suspension of classes to buy us more time to try and catch up. We are too lazy to get up in cold, damp mornings to eat, bathe, and commute to the bestial 7 am class with an equally bestial professor. The people who are working already hopefully peek at the windows and streets for any sign of a terrible downpour that will render them stranded inside their own homes. People in the streets try to find shelter in any form, huddling against any warm and dry object, alternately praying to and cursing the heavens for the deluge that will leave them shivering and tubercular in its aftermath.

But do I hate the rain? No. It cleanses somehow, even if the water came from the largest and foulest bodies of water of the land. It nourishes the wildlife. It sweeps the waste of the urban cities into large congealed masses of garbage that block drainage systems, forcing people to clean up. This has people starting on why it is the government's fault that dirty brown floodwaters teeming with pathogens once again ruin their homes and their possessions. And I amuse myself when I hear them blame everybody else but themselves when they are guilty of flinging the plastic bags, bottles, hazardous waste, and God-knows-what in their own rubbish piles. At least, I reassure myself, we know how to cope when such things happen. 

The (insert any dirty noun here; bastard, racists, etc) in the US never knew how to deal with the Katrina disaster. The governor said, “Oh, it's just rain…” while the mayor proceeded to evacuate his immediate family to Texas while watching the poor and the blacks and the poor blacks get stranded in their homes or in the Dome with no food, water, medicine, or clothes. People there won't even help each other in the crisis, preferring to murmur, “My God, we're like in the third world already!” when their evacuation centers have gleaming floors, warm cots, and organized logistics. They feel that hustling to help is way below them, and in desperation, would turn to looting and other forms of crime to get by. People there are just so stupid to think that they can lie back and wait for the government to do everything for them; they're actually shocked that their government is unprepared. It's so tempting to say, welcome to the real world, buster. Your “third world brown brothers” have experienced such disappointments since time immemorial, we've just learned to cope with the government's shortcomings big time.

Enough of this griping. Now I think maybe this is a great time for manufacturers of diapers and pads to prove that their product really does absorb as much water as it can hold.

So maybe now the weather's turning me weird.

I love the rain.

Sa Pusod ng Dagat...Ano Daw?

My last topic consisted of a rather asinine discussion of the word bellybutton and its previously unknown Tagalog counterpart. It was rather a relief for me, literally and figuratively, to finally chance upon the native term for the navel, which is pusod. Pusod is the navel literally, and so my friends say, should not be confused with the word puson that is the rather noticeable tummy part below the navel for most women. The puson becomes rather enlarged due to lack of proper exercise, pregnancy, or the monthly visitor, and has a tendency to make one's shopping trip miserable when one discovers that a beautiful pair of bottoms cannot fit or look right.

Anyway, the word pusod is also a mystery to me in the sense that it was used in the phrase sa pusod ng dagat. (I remember this Tagalog flick that was titled Sa Pusod Ng Dagat; and I don't know or care what it was all about.) Does it literally mean “the navel of the sea?” The sea actually has a navel? (Hello, sorry, bimbo moment right here...) Does the phrase refer to a part of the sea much deeper than usual, or where the oceanic crust (oh, the Geo 11 nerd in me!) is much thinner that you can actually skewer the mantle after drilling into it a few meters or so? Is it the part of the ocean once connected to land? Somebody better give me an answer quick because such questions give me insomnia most nights...

Speaking of insomnia, isn't it quite irritating when your body clock goes haywire on you? Most people actually do experience what I shall term anticipatory insomnia. When you have an early class/engagement/meeting/event the next day, the body simply refuses to get a much needed 6-8 hours of sleep to keep the mind fresh and the body energized the next day. You wake up groggy and crabby after some 0-2 hours of light sleep. When you have nothing much to do or things of little importance to you, your body simply hits the pillows as if hypnotized by the bed itself. Or sometimes, you have an exam or a major project due the next day and you take a little “5-minute” nap expecting to get an energy boost, only to wake up the next day in horror upon realizing you've slept for fourteen hours straight, with nothing on your hands or the fact that you have no excuse for missing the exam. Then there are the days when you have nothing to pass or that you have no classes but then your stupid human shell suddenly has this bright idea of adapting the “early-to-bed, early-to rise” or “the early bird gets the worm” or “an early bird is a nice obedient virtuous bird” sort of thing. Crazy isn't it?

Now, you have to excuse me because I have to ponder on my list of life's greatest mysteries and why I dreamt of bacon (yummy, crispy, golden brown, and full of nitrates that can kill me before I'm thirty sort) all night last night.

Belly Button

Can the word "belly button" be translated into Tagalog? This morning I woke up with a jolt, trying to remember if I had classes or not. It dawned on me that this was a Wednesday, my mid-week sanity break, and proceeded to think about my life's greatest mysteries today, the Tagalog counterpart of belly button being one of them. My Tagalog-English and English-Tagalog vocabulary has suffered from neglect for the past few years; I haven't heard, spoken, or written in straight Tagalog since elementary with the exception of trying to explain Machiavelli to my Soc Sci II professor last semester. I can't find the proper term for belly button in Tagalog, and I can't even remember the anatomically-correct description for the little strange hole that isn't actually a hole that once connected me to my mother's uterine lining.


Don't get me all started on my English now because I can no longer enunciate words properly as well; what usually starts out as the word "sheet" in my brain is somehow abbreviated by my tongue (and to my horror) as somehow sounding more like "shit." I comfort myself that I still haven't reached the point where I exchange f for p or pronounce spaghetti like "is-pa-ge-ti." There was a time when people were asking me for the literal translation of the Tagalog word pangingilo/nangingilo" and I couldn't help but laugh because the first words that came to my mind was the line from the Sensodyne commercial "Pain when you eat cold or hot foods." It was quite a mouthful considering that pangingilo is the sudden stabbing pain you feel upon eating food that is heated or cooled to a temperature very unlike your teeth that has been rendered sensitive by God-knows-what. Hahaha, the mysteries of translation where chemistry becomes kimika or kapnayan. But asshole that I can be, I still snigger when other people mispronounce words like sheep or fringing; sheep sounded like shep from a History classmate and fringe in the word fringing became “free-ng-ngeeng” when pronounced by my Physics professor.

Speaking of belly button, it is still a mystery to me why some people are outties and some are innies. (If you don't know what outtie or innie means, it is this: you're an outtie when your belly button protrudes and an innie if it doesn't.) Is it because of the way the umbilical cord is cut and clamped by the midwife or ob-gyne? Does it have to do with one being unusually active as a child inside the mom's womb that results to being an outtie or the nurse accidentally pulling off all the umbilical cord that results to being an innie? Some people actually make a big issue of what the belly button looks like, i.e. that it looks the print model look ugly or that it protrudes too much that the MTRCB has to sanction the TV host to wear nipple tape over her belly button. Pregnant women usually become outties if they were innies in the first place; pregnant outties usually become mega-outties like Kelly Ripa when she's pregnant.

The more mysterious thing to me is why people are so sensitive in the belly button area. Is it because the skin is thinner there? I remember the time I accidentally brushed against the belly button of my ex (we were not fooling around, mind you) and he recoiled in horror. I asked him why and he told me that his childhood nanny used to scare him that if you touch the belly button, you can eventually puncture the skin and touch your bloody innards. (Now what kind of story is that?) It somehow stuck to his mind and wouldn't even dare clean his belly button with cotton swabs and oil without sucking his breath first. Even some people recoil like my ex when I ask them if they clean theirs regularly; they are probably as afraid as my ex because some yaya of theirs told them the same ridiculous story when they were younger. I have no problems with my belly button and I am still mystified that I am the only one not squeamish enough to poke it.

Belly button was actually my mom's term of endearment, along with mahal, or anak. It rhymes with my real nick and becomes K.B.B. when my mom fully pronounces it. She rarely uses it now that I am legally an adult but somehow, she uses it when she makes lambing or wants me to be her baby again. I am actually on my last year of being a teenager and no longer quite a baby except for my occasional tantrum or panic attack. Makes me feel so old and young at the same time. Hehehe, I wonder if my mom will smile and pout sadly at the same time if she gets to read this. Advanced happy birthday, Ma. Thanks for my new room and bath room.