The Weirdness in Me

Being a Manila girl through and through, I have acquired a taste of the bizzare. In fact, it is once of the things I look for it in a city. I find comfort in the city life's strangeness. One favorite expressions is, "That's so weird!" because life in Manila IS weird.

Thomas couldn't live in Manila. The pollution in the air gave him a nasty ear infection , which made him admire the fact that I am Manila's cockroach: I can take the rancid air, the confusing streets, and the darkness in people's hearts.

One of the things that I miss about big city life is the edge that it gave me. It may not have been healthy, but these are the things that defined who I am. Dinner at 2 a.m. at a tapa joint after a one night stand, deep conversations with strangers with whom you'll never meet again, deranged lunatics raving at streetcorners, the occasional flasher.

You can take me out of the big city, but you can't take the big city out of me.

I liked Jena, but one of the things that I could never get over was the fact that it is postcard pretty. Too pretty. In it may lie a heart of darkness, but the green of the hills and the smallness of ordinary life was just too...normal. It scared me and freaked me out, because for me, it was truly weird.

I don't like the city where I live better than Jena, but I find more comfort in the fact that because of its size, weird things can still happen to me here in my new city.

I was hanging out with a co-worker and a couple of his friends at his balcony. Suddenly, a naked man materialized at the window in the building opposite his. He was smoking. Naked.

All the girls huddled excitedly at the show. The naked man, in his 30s, a thin, dark Italian type, would smoke a fag every hour. Watching us, watching him. At his third appearance he sat at his windowsill and started pulling on his man bits. The girls started to scream and laugh their heads off.

Me? I just sat back, satisfied that life was back to normal.