change of address

Syn's up again, at a new place.

Feel free to drop in :)

behind these hazel eyes

It's been a long five months, yes?

Synesthetique will be back soon.

I'd wish people a Happy Valentine's Day, but since I've already made it a policy not to do so ... well, if you see me grinning at you in the halls, you know what I'm trying to say.

wakas

Thursday, May 02, 2002
a rooftop with stars above it, a sky so big and stars so indifferent that no matter what i do, i can't hurt it. i want something undentable, something that i can break my body against without breaking it as well - something constant versus this inconstancy.

i hate this emptiness that rings inside my bones, that scrapes off the edges of my skin. and if i only knew how to fill it up, i would.

It's been a little over three years since, and I am no longer empty. I can finally close this chapter and move on.

synesthetique is closing down and will no longer be updated, although it will remain online indefinitely. I am still accessible through e-mail and YM, and I will explain the reasons behind the shutdown through either means of communication. They're mostly good reasons, so no one should have reasons to worry.

Thanks to everyone who's ever dropped by to read, and even deeper gratitude to those who stayed and left a message. I hope you had fun reading my blog, because I had fun writing it ... and remember, just because I don't blog anymore doesn't mean I'm not available to hang out :D

TQM

I am in love, and I am loved back - and what a sweet, sweet experience it is. TQM, he wrote on a scrap of paper that he handed me last week.

Total Quality Management? I asked, with confusion. We had been discussing the languages of the countries we had lived in - like me, he is a Filipino who has grown up around the world and has finally come back to roost in the motherland - and the sudden switch in topics disoriented me.

Te quiero mucho, he answered. That's how you say it in Spanish.

There are moments that take your breath away, inexplicably, and this was one of them. My hand shook as I wrote down CK on the paper before handing it back to him.

Calvin Klein? he asked, his forehead knotted in the same confusion that had been on my face earlier.

Cintaku, I replied. That's how you say 'my love' in Malay.

chicken run, continued

I feel I must clear up some confusion about the toplessness, because in order to maintain the dignity of the foreign service, people can't go around imagining that we strip off randomly in the middle of team-building activities. What happened was this: during the team-building, we were divided into three groups and asked to participate in various activities. One of those activities was the Matchstick Challenge, where we had to build a tower made out of matchsticks on the top of a (still closed) beer bottle, and then have someone pick it up and transport it from one side of the room to another.

Now, it has been repeatedly stressed during our cadetship that life in the foreign service is never simple and easy - therefore our facilitators added a twist: we would not get a supply of matchsticks; we would have to buy them with articles of clothing. A shoe got five matchsticks, eyeglasses bought two, a pair of dentures bought two (don't laugh, someone actually did exchange their dentures for matchsticks), shirts got five, and bras got TEN. Now, the psychological screening for the Foreign Service seems to select the naturally competitive, so within five seconds of the word GO, every single female participant in the room was shucking her shirt and bra.

We were, however, not completely topless - if people will recall, it was raining quite heavily in Luzon during that time, so all of us had sweatshirts and jackets on. Girls know how to dress and undress in public without showing skin, so within minutes every girl had managed to completely undress herself from under her jacket or sweatshirt. The boys stripped their shirts off and covered themselves with jackets too, but as I understand it that's not quite half as interesting.

This sounds completely skeezy, I told one of my batchmates recently, as we were rehashing that activity. But if you think about it hard enough, it's like OMG we sold our shirts and bras for MATCHSTICKS.

Long story short, we completed the activity and my group won.

In less sexy news, we were given copies of the forms that our superiors will be using to evaluate us, and according to the forms, professional performance isn't all we're supposed to excel in. Get this - we are rated on communication skills, personality, and physical appearance as well, with a short explanation that we are evaluated for "beauty, presentability, neatness, etc".

On top of all of that, married officers' rating forms have five percent set aside for rating their family - yes, you heard that right. Our spouses and children will be evaluated for sociability, personability, and overall presentability. Wonderful! I look forward to being single for life, because what man wants to run the DFA gauntlet before he is accepted into its ranks - and not as one of them, but as an official spouse? My fellow cadets and I have begun joking that alongside of the FSO exam, there needs to be an FSOS exam - the Foreign Service Officers' Spouses' exam, which will pre-evaluate men and women for their suitability as diplomatic spouses and provide us with a pool of eligible singles from which to select a potential life partner.

I find it highly ironic that they teach us things like this, then evaluate us for stress levels and chide us for being so uptight. I mean, why would the idea of working unpredictable hours in a high-stress, high-profile job with low pay and the possibility of being a complete loser outside of work faze us?

chicken run

Remind me to elaborate later, but for the moment: during our team-building in Laguna a couple of weeks before, I spent a memorable hour or so building a matchstick tower on top of a beer bottle - while both shirtless and braless.

This FSO thing is very freeing, in many ways.

exorcising government

Politics in the Philippines never ceases to amaze - and amuse - me. What made me double over, gasping for laughter, was the fact that the exorcists paid "particular attention" to the picture of Speaker de Venecia.

Speaking of exorcists, though, apparently the DFA building is haunted. We went on our walking tour earlier and came across several altars - complete with statues of the Virgin Mary, candles, and garlands of flowers. According to our guide and several of my classmates who had formerly served as casual employees for DFA, the altars had been set up at spots that were reputed to be haunted - places where there had been "sightings" of ghosts and spirits. I'm not sure if they worked; to be frank, the altars looked creepier than the allegedly haunted corners.

The thing about the DFA building is that it was inherited, so to speak, from the ADB. Built back in the 1960s, the building was designed as a fortress-cum-office building, which is to say that it was meant to be impregnable from the outside and virtually self-sustaining. In the early '60s, when DFA first moved in, the building had independent power and water sources, sufficient refrigeration units to store food for three months, and was so solidly constructed that it was supposed to be able to withstand cannon blasts from a certain distance.

As one of our resource speakers pointed out, this was in the early 1960s. Since then, the building has deteriorated to a point where our sprinklers are covered because their pipes are no longer connected to the water system, our sub-basement (which houses the gym) is no longer usable because it's been flooded for several years now, and the roof of our auditorium has collapsed. Obviously, people have also died strange deaths in the building at some point since then, because otherwise it wouldn't be haunted.

I asked our guide about them earlier - our last house in Bangkok was haunted, so I've learned how to live with ghosts - What kind of ghosts do you have?

Various and sundry, he said, as we walked briskly to the next floor. There are the apparitions, who just show up; there are the noisy ghosts, who like to sing or bang about or make noises; there are the theatrical ghosts, who move things.

And don't forget the working ghosts, chipped in one of my classmates, Who bring coffee or hand you staplers.

Isn't this absolutely fun? Not only do I get a dream job where I am required to learn golf, ballroom dancing, and love travelling - I get to work in an office that has ghosts! If I am lucky I will have a run-in with one who talks and tells stories. I will come home completely creeped out, but wouldn't that be a coup? rei's very own Tales from the Crypt.

Now if only I can keep myself from screaming and freaking them out when I finally get to see them, perhaps I could actually get a real ghost story.

shoestrings

Okay, a break from the introverted reflections and a glimpse into the lighter side of moving out - namely, the part where I finally learn how to budget my own money.

One of the things that has always worried me about living on my own is the money aspect of it, because I am horrible at handling my money. My parents have always had a rather weird approach to teaching budgeting - they used to give my sister and me very very small allowances, just enough to buy ourselves snacks or lunch during the school day. Anything else we needed or wanted - bags, a new set of pencils, the trendy new Nikes that everyone else in school was wearing - was purchased by my parents, who would evaluate the request before approving or vetoing it.

Years later, I asked my mother why she hadn't just given us normal-sized allowances and told us to go forth and budget it for all purchases that were not strictly necessary, instead of letting us bug her and my dad incessantly for toys and candy and clothes and whatnot. Unbelievably, she answered Because we didn't want to spoil you.

Mother, I said, bug-eyed, Do you not think that making us ask you to buy us anything we wanted - and GETTING IT ninety-nine percent of the time - spoiled us?

My parents' logic is, apparently, not earth logic. But I digress.

In college the strategy changed somewhat, since the rest of my family moved off to Malaysia and left me unable to run to them for the desires of my heart. For the very first time in my life, I was introduced to the concept of a budget: my parents sat down with me and told me that they would send me a certain amount per month, and that I was to spend only so much on gasoline, on internet bills, on cellphone credits, et cetera. I was very good about it for the first year, and promptly wrote a self-righteous article about my experience that I submitted to The Inquirer's Youngblood column (which, amazingly enough, got published). The second and third years I was not quite so disciplined - it is hard to stay disciplined and on-target with a budget when every four to six months, you go "on vacation" from it. I spent summer and Christmas vacations with my family, during which I was spoiled shamelessly - my mother would spend most of the year shopping for me, and every time my sister and I went out in KL we would get shopping money. I would perenially run overbudget, then e-mail my parents asking them to send extra money - requests they never turned down.

After college I moved to KL to be with my family, and budgets flew out the window: I had an ATM account, a tiny but respectable salary from my job in my dad's office (where I did nothing except write letters and call people), a credit card, and shopping or movie money every time we went out. I remember two years of never leaving a mall without having purchased at least one article of clothing or a pair of shoes - and now I can't find half of what I bought back then, which is sad.

I cut up my credit card and returned my ATM card to my mother after I got my first real job - I didn't want to end up spending their money when I was earning my own - and for the first time in my life, I knew what it was like to run out of money. In the still-not-helping category, though, I had my parents, who would sigh, roll their eyes, and lend me money whenever I ran out.

To this day I still have a tendency to spend whatever's in my wallet and then go home expecting to have it automatically refilled - but obviously I'm not going to be able to do that, now that I technically live on my own. Therefore last week I sat down and worked out a budget with S, which did not help much since our initial budgets ran amok and would have required a much larger income than what we were actually receiving. Five hours, three budgets, and much head-scratching and calculator-pounding later, we finally came out with a budget that looked reasonable - by which I mean we had cut our expenditures to match our incomes.

The next day, sleepless and incredibly proud of ourselves, we brought our neatly rewritten budget to class, where we showed it off to our other batchmates. TC looked it over and her eyebrows shot straight to her forehead: rei, she said disbelievingly, how much, exactly, do you think soap and shampoo costs nowadays ... and how many elephants do you plan on bathing with them?

I blinked. You mean I won't spend that much? I asked, looking at the figures I had written down; S had expressed no objections to them and therefore I had assumed they were accurate.

No, she replied, quite emphatically. And here, what is this figure here?

Transportation, I explained. I factored in cab fare.

JB, overhearing, rolled her eyes. You must learn to use buses and jeeps! she cried. You'll run yourselves into bankruptcy, with a budget like that.

So, obviously, I haven't worked out the kinks in that area yet - and my mother still looks skeptical every time I talk about my plans for the future. Apparently they're not very realistic plans, for the type of budget I have on my hands. What I am concentrating on learning, for the meantime, is how to control my spending, because earlier I was in Greenhills and ended up spending roughly the equivalent of a week's worth of lunch money in thirty minutes. At this rate, I will be living off Skyflakes at the end of the month.

Where there is lack of knowledge, however, there should be a corresponding desire to learn - and in the interest of survival, that desire burns high and bright in me. Therefore I shall rework that blasted budget so that it accommodates my weak spots, and in so doing become a better person. Also, I should really stop looking at it as if I were destitute - it's not starvation pay, it's just a lot less than what I'm used to.

And if all else fails, I shall repeat my mantra of hope: It's only for the next two years.

down and out, up and coming

Guess who's in Greenhills right now, two minutes away from slashing her wrists with the tips of her precision tweezers because everything's on sale and she can't afford to buy anything. Three guesses - the first two don't count. What makes it harder is that Greenhills reminds me of the little shops in Siam Square, where I was a little over two years ago, shopping my shallow little heart out. I went to Bangkok in June with one suitcase and left in July with three, and now my heart bleeds for my old credit card, which I cut up once I started working because I didn't want to "accidentally" spend my parents' money on my random shopping sprees.

It's funny what you discover you can live without. Two years ago I was a snivelling, depressed mess of a girl who had just spent almost four months of her life living out of a suitcase as she moved around her various home countries. I reached Manila again in August of 2003 and promptly fell apart, crying in the arms of a boy who had never known any other home, any other bed, any other city except the one he had grown up in.

(There are bridges you cannot build, much less cross, no matter how much you think you love someone. Sometimes, remembering how that was like, I find it hard to imagine myself with anyone anymore. It's hard to fall in love with fragments.)

He wanted me to move back to Manila, but I was hesitant: My family will be moving soon, I said, because at that point we thought we were going to be leaving for the US in less than six months. At the time, I thought I could not live without my family - I was deathly afraid of ending up living in a place where I could not readily call on my mother when I got sick, my dad when I got stranded or ran out of cash, or my sister when I was bored or lonely.

It's been two years, and here I am. This morning I saw my mother off at the airport; she's moving to LA to work, and the hospital she's working for has already arranged to have an apartment ready for her so that she can ship her belongings straight there. My dad's preparing to leave, as well, because they don't like being apart and anyway, he has a friend in DC who's keeping an office space open for him to base his consultancy work from. Freakchild - she's finding her way in Manila, somehow, I think. Friday night I was standing along Roxas Boulevard, chatting with my batchmates while we waited for a cab, and one of them asked me Aren't you sad that your mother's moving away?

I laughed at that: Not right now, I admitted. Although watch this space, because in about two months it will probably hit me and I'll start walking around like a zombie.

In Cagayan de Oro about a year ago, I went white-water rafting. At one point along the river, we stopped, got off, and climbed a steep path to a rope bridge that was suspended some ten to fifteen feet above the river. Now what you have to do, said our guide once we had reached the bridge, is jump into the river from here. Conceptually, it wasn't difficult - there were little boys jumping off the bridge, dressed in nothing but flimsy shorts, and there we all were bundled up in sports gear and life jackets. Then you found yourself standing at the edge of the bridge, looking down, and suddenly jumping didn't seem like a very smart thing to do at all.

Don't look before you leap! our guide advised. If you start calculating distances and velocity, you'll never make it off the bridge. And, he added cheerfully as an added incentive, I'm going to jump too so I'm sure as hell not going to help you climb back down.

So there I was, standing at the edge of the bridge, clutching at the ropes on either side of me - the very last place I would ever have chosen to be, considering that I am terrified of heights. Don't think! the guide yelled, still sounding inappropriately chipper, and I briefly considered kicking him. Then, mid-thought, I stepped off the bridge and spent the next few seconds simultaneously hurtling through space and thinking Oh shit, I haven't even written my last will and testament yet, I wonder if my mother will ever forgive me for willingly trying to kill myself through adventurism -

and SPLOOSH, I hit the water, sank like a stone, and flailed my way up. Once I made it to the surface I started spluttering triumphantly - mainly because I'd done something completely illogical and terrifying and downright stupid, and survived it.

When I was thirteen, less than two years after we moved to Manila, we moved house and changed schools in the same year. For a year after that, I kept on dreaming that I was falling - that I was running along the edges of a precipice or a cliff, chasing something, and that just before I reached it the ground would crumble beneath me and I would tumble into empty air, falling. I always woke up gasping, afraid to go back to sleep, because when I did I would always find myself in the same dream, over and over again.

That's how I feel right now, all the time: as if I am running, falling, landing unexpectedly in a safe place, then repeating the cycle. Sometimes I think it's funny that people think I've made it, that my younger friends ask me for advice, that people have the general impression that I know what I'm doing. It's a case of the blind leading the blind: I can only tell you what I'm doing - I can't even tell you if it works, and let's not even talk about whether it'll work for you. What I do know is that I'm learning - sometimes in very abrupt and unexpected ways - that I can exist without certain people, certain things, certain comforts. It's not always fun, but it's perpetually interesting; after the initial shock and pain and depression, I always turn back and think: I didn't need that after all, how surprising.

For everything I lose, I receive something in its place - I still go back to that line from time to time, reminding myself. I don't think I'll ever stop being afraid of losing things, of losing people, of change in and of itself, the way I never stopped being terrified of falling in that recurring dream, no matter how many times I had it.

On the other hand, I don't have to be afraid of reaching my future empty-handed either.

the red room

I am dead sleepy - we've started our cadetship and it sounds rather stupid to say that it's tiring to do nothing but sit in an air-conditioned room and listen to people talk, but it is. After about fifteen minutes of listening and taking down notes, my body starts craving movement and I start wanting to spin my chair, play percussion on my knees, do tai-chi in the middle of the room, get up and do sprints up and down the halls of the Foreign Service Institute - anything to be able to move something aside from my arm.

The schedule for the first module is absolutely dreary; I've looked through it and the only activities that look promising are briefing sessions with the Office for the UN and other International Organizations (UNIO) and the Secretary General to the UNESCO National Commission, and the DFA walking tour, during which I think we're scheduled for an audience with the Secretary.

This is not to say I haven't learned anything, though - there's a lot of information being stuffed into us, and there are times I go home feeling drained and overwhelmed. On our first day, we were given the opportunity to quiz older diplomats on the realities of life in the foreign service. A batchmate of mine asked what his future wife's chances at a career were if she were to accompany him to his postings - she's a psychologist - and the answer was a blunt Not very good, unless you get posted to a place where she is allowed to work; apparently spouses of diplomats accompany them to their posts as dependents, unless they independently apply for, and obtain, working visas. What about the flip side of that? I asked. If, for example, I get married to someone who is not in the foreign service - what are his chances at a career?

There was a speaking silence before one of the ambassadors took up the microphone and answered me, his voice laden with sympathy. Hija, he said, You have to understand that many women who enter the service as single women tend to remain single. It is very difficult for a spouse to maintain his or her career when he or she is trailing after a diplomat whose geographical location changes as necessity demands it. That is a very difficult reality for wives - we have a handbook for the wives of diplomats that assists them through these situations. It is a near impossible reality for husbands.

It's been two days, and people keep on repeating the same implied message: that it is the female who steps down or backs away from her career, in order to accommodate a relationship. The assumption is that I am a woman, and that I will most likely have to choose between love and a career - and the same assumption is made of the future wives of my male batchmates, that they will sacrifice their own careers to follow their husbands around the world. On the first day, when I heard that, it struck me as so unfair that I sat down and had to try very hard not to cry in the middle of our first briefing. I would have been willing to accept being single for the rest of my life, if that was what transpired, but to be told that my only choices were to remain single, or else find a partner from within the service - that still had the power to shock me.

On the other hand - I love what I am doing so much, and I have dreamed of doing this ever since I was fifteen years old, and scribbled down I am going to be a diplomat on a piece of paper that I crumpled up and threw away because it was a desire so strong that it had to remain hidden. There is a part of me that has been quietly preparing for this time, and is slowly emerging as a big, bright glad thing - the way a plant does when you place it in its ideal environment. I cannot imagine being fully myself if I had not been given this opportunity - and I cannot imagine loving someone who did not understand that this is where I belong.

If there really was a choice to be made, I think I've made it. I hope they're wrong.

- - -

It's been a while, and I have absolutely no access to the internet (or to a computer, for that matter) in Pasay. I will slap the next person who comes up to me grousing about how I really owe them because their taxes pay my salary, since (a) payroll processing in the government takes forever - we're probably going to have to wait a couple of months 'til our next salary, so right now we're not getting paid; and (b) the government is under permanent austerity measures. This translates into junior officers (translated: peons) like me having to make do with ridiculous situations such as having to share one computer between twenty-some people. Which is to say, I don't know where your taxes are going, people, but rest assured that very very very little of it is going to me.

It's been two days in my own room, which is about fifty steps away from DFA. I haven't counted the number of steps it takes to get to the gate yet, but I think one day I will. So far I love the place - it's a trifle stuffy because the window is the size of a credit card slot and I am afraid that once summer comes I will suffocate to death unless I sleep with my face pressed to the window, but otherwise it's perfect and I love it.

This is where I live now: in a tiny partitioned room in the corner of the attic of a house that is a few feet away from my office. My room is on the top floor, at the far end of the corridor; you go up the stairs, walk down the narrow hallway, and stop at the very last door on your right, and that's my place. I'm on the corner, so the ceiling slants downward into my room; I can walk normally around half of my room and crawl around the other half.

There is a small, functional closet in the corner opposite the door. There is a table, tucked into the slant of the room. There is a narrow bed pushed against the wall next to the door - and that is all the furniture I have. It would look bare, I think, except for the fact that I live in it and there is evidence of my existence all over my room: in the clothes hanging in my closet, in the half-open suitcase still stuffed with clothes pushed against the wall, in the bags lined neatly up against a corner, in the robe and towel hanging off the hooks on the walls, in the various lotions and cosmetics arranged on the table.

My favorite part of the room, though, is my bed - which is the tiniest, narrowest, flimsiest bed I've ever slept in in my entire life (the only exception being the cot I slept in for a month when we first moved back to Manila). There was a mattress on it before I moved in, but my mother - who is germ-phobic - took one look at it, wrinkled her nose, and promptly brought back a maid to disinfect it and another mattress to lay over it. My bedsheets are blue and white, the blue faded from countless washings, my pillow pale blue and fluffy. I brought my four favorite stuffed animals with me, because there are some things you have to take with you wherever you go, and they sleep scattered around me, within reach so that if I wake up abruptly in the night, all I have to do is reach out and grab one. The best part, however, is the mosquito net - the landlady assured my mother that there are no mosquitos in the house, but I don't think my mother believed her because she went right out and bought a mosquito net. My net is red - my father shook his head when he saw it, because I think he thinks I'm too old for bright colors. However - because he loves me - he came in with my mother on Sunday and helped her string it up, and now I sleep in a bed that is cocooned by a web of gauzy red netting.

In the evenings, when I come back from work, I immediately shower, change my clothes, and crawl into my bed, tucking the mosquito net in after me. Then I lean back against the wall and smile up at the light, filtering in through the red gauze above me, and think I'm probably going to live here for the next two years.

That doesn't faze me at all.