journey to my twentieth year

After lunch on Saturday, Mr. Inkblot, Mr. Balladeer (also known as Mr. Diacre, Mr. Editor, Mr. Merilion, or simply, Tatay) and I headed to Balara. In Mercury Drugstore, we bought a pack of strawberry candies, some salty junk food, and our staple liquid nourishment (mineral water for me and Mr. Inkblot, and a one-liter Coke for Mr. Balladeer). After some more dilly-dallying, in which the cheese-lover Mr. Inkblot got outvoted by the two barbecue-lovers over the issue of the Taquitos flavor, we got on a Jayross and headed for the World Trade Center.

Along the way, Mr. Balladeer and Mr. Inkblot sang the whoooollllle soundtrack of Hairspray. Exag, hihi! This outpouring--or more like, belting out--of addiction to the musical made this little girl, standing on the seat in front of ours, stare and stare and stare. Whenever Mr. Balladeer looked at her, smiled and wrinkled his nose, the little girl would shrink behind the backrest and peer on the slits between the chairs. She reminded me of a clownfish hastily retreating to its anemone. Then, after Tracey's solos came the ballads. That's why Mr. Balladeer is being called such in this post. He has a wide spectrum of abilities--from cooking lunch to memorizing every line in a movie to imitating the voices of Disney characters to playing RPG to making girls cry to making them stop crying to flower arranging to gift wrapping and even single fathering. Ehem! Single fathering. Emphasis on the last two words. ;p

Anyway, if you did not get the joke, we'll just move on to when we got to the World Trade Center where we immediately spotted Ate Jojee and Kuya Ian, seated on what looked like a cafe on the lawn. After meeting the teenagers from DCBC Youth, we went inside the huge airconditioned warehouse (it took me five misspellings to get the correct spelling of warehouse) and saw Faberge eggs on display. Deeper into the hall, we were buried in books. Loads and loads of them. And they were sooooo... expensive. There were Engineering books, Chemistry books, Math books, Nursing books, Psychology books, Business Management books... all the textbooks on practical courses nowadays. There were fewer Literature, Art and Music books, compared to the subjects I mentioned. That quite disappointed me. And it doubly disappointed me when there were almost three million books about Terrorism and none about Postcolonialism or Islam. Grr...

I bought some cook books instead. Cookbooks are my comics. They were the cheapest I saw around. Php 30 - 75. Glossy paper. Full color. Looking at the photos of meringues and chicken chow mein and macaroni with sweet cocoa sauce made my mouth water. We settled for KFC for dinner. There, we saw Sir Emil Francis Flores. Oddly enough, the three of us had him for a teacher already. He taught Comics and Popular Literature. And he's a Christian. And he was with his wife. :)

We rode a Mannrose back to Balara. All along the journey, I fell asleep because I was exhausted. It was raining when we got to their flat. We immediately started work on Dormwatch. When the clock struck twelve, the two men greeted me

Happy birthday!

... to be continued