Ang Kahon

I'm supposedly on holiday but still I woke up at 7:30 am today. Since I arrived home I've been sharing a bed my dad who, I discovered, snores like crazy together with his regular trips to the bathroom in the middle of the evening.

At four in the morning, I hear the pan de sal (some type of bread usually eaten at breakfast) seller going around the village hollering at the top his voice.

At five, tricycles start plying the streets and we all know how annoying they sound.

At six, some sanctimonious radio announcer, who the household listens to every freaking day that God makes, comments about the ludicrous Senate hearing on the latest sex-video scandal.

At seven, the neighbor, armed with a Magic Sing microphone, wails to some stupid Bon Jovi song in front of his TV for the whole village to hear.

All these and a cacophony of other annoying noise leaves me no choice but to drag my self out of the bed while holding back my self from shoving the Magic Sing down my obese neighbor's throat. Ugh.

Good morning, bitches! Nothing makes a perfect morning than good old bitching, chai mai?

That said, let's go to more inane stuff.

As a ritual, one of the first things I did when I arrived home was unearth my box. THE box contains some memorabilia of the days when I had a body mass index of 15, and we all know how long ago that has been.

I discovered gazillions of letters from friends in high school (Nikki, haler!!!!). I hang out with these friends at school everyday but we exchanged letters nonetheless on things such as thank-you-for-being-the-best-friend-in-the-world. I swear I find them cute, I truly do.

And then there are also loads of letters from my girl "pen-pals" from all over the world, i.e. Finland, Brazil, Sri Lanka, and even Thailand. Together with my high school friends, we once went crazy collecting pen-pals. Which reminds me, I might check the names of these pen-pals on Facebook.

Oh, back to the other contents of the box.

I also unearthed dozens and dozens of student papers from my university days. Hardly anyone owned a computer then so we wrote our drafts in long hand on yellow pads (after which we went to the computer shop to type and print them. History lesson, anyone?).

There are also a few graded papers and blue books. The latter reminds of how poorly I did in some of my courses. I disliked my major subjects like law, project management, and public finance. I often find my self inside the university cinema the night before long exams, which explains why I barely passed my major subjects. On the other hand, I worked hard on minor subjects that were more interesting for me, e.g. literature, sociology, philosophy, and international relations.

The box also contained many of my artworks (naks!) when I dabbled into watercolor while in the university. I also found my stamp and money collection still in good condition. Oh, I still even saved my medals from school. Ewwwww.

There were likewise a few notebooks and scraps of paper of some amateurish poems I wrote (goodness, please remind me to burn them ASAP).

But the things that I refuse to burn are my journals, no matter how embarrassing their contents actually are. There quite a good number of them journals, one is as far back as 1994. I've read a few entries from the various journals and I could not believe I bothered to write about such inanities as "it rained today". Now I realize how I became the queen of writing inanities.

Those journals are worth closer inspection though, mainly to find out how I think then. I wonder if I changed that much. In my 1996 journal for instance, I remember writing a lot about my confusion on my sexuality in between comments about the latest storm that hit Surigao. There are also a few entries about how I questioned religion interspersed with notes about the latest pregnancy in high school.

Gosh, major processing itech!

I'm bringing the old journals back to BKK.

Meanwhile, I decided to throw away a few of the box's contents, such as school notebooks covered in purple art paper and empty purple pens (I was THAT gay).

So I made more space in the box, hopefully to fill it with a few more stuff as I go along.