kalapati, mababa ang lipad mo.

As of next week, I will be living in Manila, not Quezon City - in a tiny room half the size of my current bedroom, located in a house that is less than two minutes' walk away from my office. I took my mother to see the house this morning, and she stood in the middle of the room - which, incidentally, has a slanted ceiling because it's in the attic - and I watched her facial muscles work overtime to contain her dismay. Does this place have a lease? she asked.

Aside from a month's advance and another month's deposit, I answered, No. So technically if I want to try it out I have to stay for at least two months.

She spent another few minutes turning around - you can't really walk around in the room, especially if there's another person in it - and peering warily at things. Okay, she finally said, briskly. You can try this out for two months and if you like it, we'll have it fixed up so it's ... better.

Mama, I said, half-laughing, half-alarmed. Remember I told you I was getting paid a pittance? My salary won't cover the cost of renovations.

Don't be ridiculous, she sniffed. Your father and I will have it done - you need a screen and bars on your window, at the very least. God forbid you die of malaria in the service of our country, which is falling apart Heaven help us all.

(Well okay, she didn't say all of that, but I'm compressing her speech because by golly, my mother can talk.)

S and I have spent the past couple of weeks in horrified amusement over the severe reduction in our economic status. On one particularly memorable night, we spent several hours budgeting the pittance that serves as government salary - and came to the dismal conclusion that we would either have to give up most of our creature comforts, or forgo eating. Most of our batch get-togethers are spent frantically calculating and re-calculating, trying to figure out how we are to keep body and soul together on what we are to be paid. During our batch orientation, we overheard the officers whispering in front, debating over whether or not to tell us about how much we were going to be earning. They might back out if we tell them, hissed one officer. But we can't let them be sworn in without telling them, protested another. They finally decided to tell us, and there was silence for a moment before you could hear the loud, collective clack of all our jaws simultaneously dropping.

Fortunately my batchmates all seem to have a healthy sense of humor, and we spend much of our time together giggling about our pseudo-poverty and the fact that once we enter DFA, we will exist as lowly maggots on the bottom of the rigid hierarchy of officers. The other week S was fantasizing about getting funky lapel mikes with which we could communicate to one another while we were coordinating major events. We'll have call signs too, she enthused, getting carried away and pretending to speak into an imaginary lapel mike. Eagle 1, are you in? Eagle 1, this is Hawk. Has the Queen landed?

We'll have to race to get all the cool birds, JB pointed out. I mean, who wants to get stuck with, say, Sparrow?

Don't forget, I added, that technically we're at the bottom of the DFA pecking order - which means that all the other senior officers will get their pick of callsigns long before we come to the table. There was a brief silence as we all digested this, broken by my coming in with a pretend callsign. Hello, Goose 1, are you there?

TC immediately picked up the imaginary call - Duck 1, this is Goose 1. I'm reading you.

We were howling over that when BT - another batchmate - jumped in with Goose and Duck, this is Chicken, I read you. Have you seen Pigeon? I heard she's flying low again* - which sent us into a fresh round of laughter. If I had known diplomacy was this ripe for comedy, I would have joined the foreign service years ago.

We start work this coming Monday, and I am still mentally gearing myself for the economic crash. My mother still sounds skeptical of my ability to rough it in the postage stamp of a room I will be living in for two months, but I figure that I've got to learn to let go of my creature comforts at some point in my life. In any case, on days I can't take it I am only two hours and a text message away from my house - and on a regular basis I have a group of batchmates who are all in the same boat and have decided to laugh about it rather than complain.

I think I'm set - here goes, for the trial two months. Kalapati, kalapati, babaan mo ang lipad mo.**

* Translated into Tagalog, which is the language we were speaking at the time, this would become Nakita niyo ba si Kalapati? Narinig kong mababa na naman ang lipad niya. This plays off a Tagalog idiom, where a low-flying pigeon is a euphemism for a woman of ill-repute.

This entire conversation actually reads funnier if you mentally translate it into Tagalog - because our callsigns were, respectively, Itik, Pato, Manok, and Kalapati.

** A different conjugation of the same idea - Pigeon, pigeon, fly lower.