Temptation
It’s Françoise’s first dive and the scene was breathtaking!
“Parfait! Cote d’azure est parfait!” she gurgled out of her regulator.
A clown fish zoomed below and she followed suit.
Then she felt tipsy…
she remembered that too much nitrogen can induce a drunken stupor.
Agitated, she headed straight towards the light…
but kept finning down.
In the Darkness
Buboy was alone at Quezon Ave. one night. Toto appeared, grabbed him and screamed "Give me your money!" Buboy looked at him and asked "Brother, do you know Jesus?" shocked and touched, Toto put his guard down and replied "No, why?" In a flash Buboy took his own knife and stabbed. "Because, I don’t too."
Supposedly for this week I was about to write an entry for job prospects in the future if ever Physics didn’t work out but since it was Mother’s Day yesterday a tribute for “ma mére” seems more apt.
In the middle of writing this entry, I am at the same time talking to my mother on the phone. No, rather listening to my mother on the phone since writing and talking at the same time is just taxing. And the “conversation/ sermon/ homily/ litany” swerved from Ancient History (“Honestly Paul, when I was young I was the one responsible at home while I juggle school work…; I was the most beautiful among my siblings, I tell you I’m the apple of your Lolo’s eye…), current events (“How’s Tito Edwin?…; So, I heard Ian passed Pisay…”), to my future (“When you retire from your job, don’t forget to thank the Lord for everything…; When I have grandchildren…) If it just wasn’t tender, the chat would be very funny.
One day in junior high I was shocked to see my Mama at school in a PTA, I had that reaction since I never told her about it (not that I don’t want her there, I just forgot) and when I talked to her I was surprised that she was very much ‘in-touch’ with the news in and out of the confines of my school. Heck, she knows the ‘who’s-with-who’ among my friends from elementary who’s also at the same high school. She would ask me how projects I have that I don’t tell her about are doing (“Oh, how’s the English play?) It suddenly occurred to me… My mother… is a spy!
Either that or she is my longest running stalker. But really, maybe a top-secret government Intelligence Agency hired her to do espionage missions and at her spare time she would use her skills to pry on her children’s lives! (Don’t ask me how our pathetic government could ever own an 
Intelligence Center, maybe that’s where all the ‘corrupted/ stolen’ money goes to. [There’s an episode in 7’s Darna wherein there is a Secret Service somewhere in Manila, haha, that sure sent me in a fit of laughter {Yes, I watch Darna, ‘got a problem with that? <Angel Locsin is hooooot>}]) Now that’s a LOT of digressions, going back to the topic which is my mother, her visage could back up my claim that she is living a double life. My mother looks Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Indonesian! She could very well be an agent for neighbor states.
There is a catch though, she doesn’t know many languages, she knows only Filipino and English and her enunciation is terrible …or maybe she’s just covering up to make me believe that! After all she is MY mother, me the trying- hard polyglot.
I guess I am just astonished how my mother manages to juggle the family and it’s affairs day-by-day, week after week. How she could swallow up frustrations (“You guys have high IQs but you don’t work hard that’s why you don’t get good grades, unlike me…blah, blah”), fatigue (“All I’m asking is for you guys to wake up so that you won’t be late for school while I would be the one who would wake up at 4 in the morning…”) and the incessant changes in her schedule:
(Mama is at my baccalaureate mass, she’s already been late for work plenty of times that week fixing things at school for my kuya [Do you see how complicated her life is?])
Boss: Oh, Where’s Helen?
Co-worker: Ah… She’s in the comfort room!
Mothers really are the best. Even with recollections of tons of embarrassing situations I have to put up to because of her, plenty of tears because of arguments we had, I count all of these as rubbish as compared to the opportunity of experiencing the love and care she gives me as my mother. And I praise the Lord for putting me in her life and likewise putting her in my life, I thank Him for my Mama, my mother the spy.
I love you Ma!
