today is the last day of the first month the the year 2009. an occasion so momentous, i want to take dedicate a whole post, a whole salamagan post, to...my favorite annual planner.
for five years now, i have been using the planner Pioneer Insurance gives out to its friends and valued clients. i am neither to pioneer insurance. i just get them from either my former boss or eldest sister.
i've seen better planners. the collector's planner ING gave out in 2002 still makes me regret not being on their friends list. leather bound, gilded pages, the yummiest paper ever. sigh.
but pioneer insurance planner and i, we go a looooong way back.
on cold, lonely days, i get out my planners, look lovingly at each entry, and say to myself: you have not been lazy naman pala this past five years, yen.
my friend ryann elumba over at seed interactive is trying to create a database of zamboangueño bloggers. He says:
"This petition is for all Zamboangueños (even those who are living in another city or country) who own a blog...Zamboanga bloggers can participate regardless of the type of blog service provider (i.e. blogspot, wordpress, multiply, friendster)."
thanks ryann for initiating this worthwhile project. i hope many will submit their blogs for inclusion.
if he could swallow the book whole like a boa constrictor, he would. 
the reason why i am posting this photo now is to commemorate a new love: bicycling. and instances of him lounging like this are on the wane.
his first bike run was along the highway near our place (this is not his first time to ride a bike. he learned how to about three years ago then forgot all about it). he came home with a badly abraded ankle and knee and a grin that reached his temples. the second run was a secret until he arrived home, filthy, recounting his ride from our house, to san jose, then baliwasan, then camins, then sta. maria, then back home to san roque. the third time, just this weekend, he went to boulevard! by himself! alone! solo! without a companion!
something has finally captivated him as passionately as reading has.
when you did something particularly jologs (though the word didn't enter my lexicon until i started teaching college students), the neighborhood kids in my particular purok of baranggay san roque, zamboanga city had a vile label for you: "de omerloket".
i didn't know what, where, who "de omerloket" was. i was a snotty kid just arrived from the even more provincial hinunangan, southern leyte, frustrated in my struggle to always remember that "ojas" was leaf and "ojos" meant eyes, and keeping the bile down when new friends suggested we cook "atole" because that just meant congee and will not require us to pool our ear waxes in an empty can of alpine and cook it over dead banana leaves.
i eventually learned what "de omerloket" implied. it roughly translates into "from a place called Omerloket." it further implied that the inhabitants of this mythical place were ignorant, hick, uncouth, awkwardly simple, maybe even...dumb.
so if you are from omerloket (de omerloket), you are all of those things i just said.
so we avoided doing anything that would merit the label. thus my ongoing quest for coolness started.
so i was dumbstruck when 30 or so years later, a friend of a friend tells me Omerloket does exists. Its an interior baranggay near Vitali. and it's name is more sophisticated than our childhood phonetic spelling: its actually Merloquet. see, it even sounds faintly French. and the inhabitants, they apparently wear clothes. some even have cellphones. imagine that.
now, it's famous (in fairness to me, not THAT famous) for its waterfalls:
the people you see crouching on the stones are not cave men, they are mountaineers from the lowlands. among them, i think, is the friend of my friend who is now my friend too. her name is suzette. this photo was taken by her co-mountaineer.
if someone calls me "de omerloket" now, i wouldn't mind. with this in your backyard, who would?
as if it is not enough that someone beat me to yenblanco as username in multiply, emillene of outofababesmouth tells me there is also a yendelgado.
you know what they say, if you think you are unique, wait 'til you meet your 10,000 clones in china.
met up with dear old friends during my last trip to manila.
since my former boss left zamboanga about two years ago, we have never really managed to sit down to talk for a lengthy period of time, something we used to do a lot when he still ruled over adzu, something which i thoroughly enjoyed (the chats, not necessarily the ruling over). he'd still come down to zamboanga from manila where he is now based quite often but when he is in town, so many people want a piece of him (like they do britney spears) that it's impossible to get a quiet moment with him.
after several moving around of our schedule - because apparently, many people want a piece of him in manila too - we finally decided on meeting up for breakfast at.....macdonalds. yuck. i know. but what can i do? he had to say mass at AIM across the street at 9.30. good thing they have a mccafe there now, an isolated area where you can sit amidst calming browns and adult furniture instead of being assaulted by all the reds and yellows and high chairs.
as usual, it was a good chat. we talked about many things: kidnappings in mindanao (i have a theory about this but tom clancy might plagiarize it), this and that.
the food was remarkably unremarkable.
this is me and my former boss, bill kreutz, the loveable slave-driver (his mom's irish, his dad's german. is this a politically correct info to include here?):
fr. bill and i were joined an hour later than he should have by a former student and now friend kenny macrohon. his alibi was that he watched grey's anatomy til three am. hah. we let him think we believed him:
kenny is one guy in a hurry. he's smart and he can do anything he wants to do. and he has an uncanny ability to always emerge at the top of the heap. amazing person.
BUT, one, he came late for our appointment. Two, it turns out the party he said he was heading to right after our breakfast turned out to be not just NOT in the venue he thought it would be, it was NOT even taking place on the time and date he thought it be. He showed up with a pink ribboned gift for a little girl who was going to have her party a week later. Nice one, ken.
thanks for the breakfast, fr. bill. next time, we should have coffee at dusit or intercon, even if, sigh, they do not serve toys with their meals.
my last trip to manila was a hectic one. but i am glad i managed to meet up with old friends. even if it was over an awful cup of coffee.
