Peculiar Obsessions & Following Orders

 

 

I have this peculiar obsession with watching airplanes in the sky, especially when they just took off or about to land.  In that short distance that I drive through the airport going to work and back everday via highway, I have this compulsion of staring at the airplanes that come and go at just enough time to identify the airline and gleefully fantasize that I’m on them. I don’t know if it’s the thought of going home, or just the anticipation of it. But for a while now, I think this is just an obsession with the idea of it.

 

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My brother enjoys traveling.  He has traveled overseas 44 times already.  On stopovers, he enjoys watching the airport flight schedule as they flip and change status.  Ttrrttrrttrrrtt!

 

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Stefan has an unusual facility with numbers.  Shortly after he turned 2, he could count until 100 by following the pattern of counting forward himself.  Now at 3, he can read random 4-digit-numbers, he counts odd and even numbers forward and back, and he can tell missing numbers in a series.  He is drawn to numbers every since he was little.  He had a love affair with the IKEA catalogue for a long time since he was little because of the prices and pages.  When Sherwin put them away, he resorted to the Bible which has even more pages.  He plays with the calculator a lot, too, by pressing a number, “+”, “+” then  “=” repeatedly until the numbers reach infinity.

 

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As I was doing his lootbags for his birthday, he took each lootbag and read each name out loud.  That’s when I realized he can read or he may just have familiarity with words -- people's names and other words he comes across regularly.  It must be his love for reading, too, as he has memorized some of his books already, like My Car.

 

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Out of the blue one time I asked him what number is on Devon’s shirt in the class picture. He said 36.  And he was right.  Today he has memorized the colour of the shirt each classmate is wearing in the picture and he would recite all their names in the same order as in the class picture. 

 

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"The Jeep is behind the pick-up truck," he says when he looks out the window.  "The pick-up truck is hiding in number 40," he adds.  He knows Unit 50 has SUV, Unit 42 has a big van, Unit 38 has a black car and a van, Maya lives in Unit7 and we live in 41.

 

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Stefan knows all the Thomas characters by heart from simple names as Gordon & Henry to complicated ones like Smelter Shed Cargo cars and Giggling Troublesome Trucks, their colours, numbers, and which ones have tenders.  We discovered that when we gave him a Thomas track for his second birthday.  He was more interested in the pamphlet that came with the track than the track itself.  He keeps it in my bag everywhere we go, no matter how dilapidated it had gotten, so he can look at it when he gets bored… until he has memorized them.  One time he just recited all of them in that very order as in the pamphlet.

 

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This morning I randomly asked him what number is in his moisturizer.  He said one-hundredy-thirty-nine -- 139 ml. How strange.

 

 

 

Ugugug Ugug

It’s my term of endearment with Nat.  There’s a story behind the name which only the two of us know.  It has been constantly evolving, adding syllables, flipping back and forth between Ug and Eg, and going with a tune we call ‘snake charmer,’ which – again – only the two of us know how it came about. 

 

This is just one of the silly things we do together – making up names.  We often laugh at things that only we can understand the humour behind each of them.  She’ll make me laugh until my tummy ache or until both of us fall from our chairs, or until we cry from laughing too hard.  I’d cry when she cries and then we would laugh after crying.  Having grew up practically together with a 2-year gap, we had shared lots of good moments together, also some not-so-good ones which we both would just laugh about when we look back at them.  I have a pregnant recollection of these moments and all those things I miss doing with her.

 

 

-          US, China, Japan, Taiwan & Hong Kong, trips we always go together

-          Spending recess together, walking away and still looking back until we lose sight of each other

-          Going to your classroom in Grade 5 after somebody has stolen my bag, and cry

-          Buying tempura and gulaman from Brown Gate after dismissal

-          Pinching you with my long nails when we were little

-          Singing along to your Chinese songs, when you were still a “wedding singer”

-          Being pokpok on the head with your mic

-          “Guilty as a broken bean”

-          Our Ama Angkong is alive jingle

-          “I feel faint, I… I… “

-          “Oh a really muems”

-          Name-calling Dich with Tiki, Porcy, Elaine, Achaku

-          Your impersonations

-          Playing mooncake dice game using the things in our study room

-          Hiding notebooks from Tutor

-          Folding Lifesavers as lagay for Tutor when you got a failure letter

-          Memorizing Miss Universe interview segments, pretending we were the contestants, host, even the interpreters

-          Dressing up our Barbies as Miss U contestants

-          Your first Angel Face Barbie and my Pretty in Pink and all our other Barbies

-          Memorizing Biology and Dentistry terms with you

-          Laughing at me when I cried after taking the jeep from school

-          Wearing same clothes, just different colours

-          Sharing and not wanting to share clothes

-          Shouting “don’t come!” when we bathe

-          Celebrating our birthdays at the same time each year

-          Taking our pick of Sanrio items by jack-and-poy

-          Collecting Sanrio together

-          Buying the same cellphone and the same camera

-          Keeping us updated on the happenings back home

-          Reading your emails where you discuss in detail parties you attended, what dishes were served, who went and who wore what

-          Showing us different things through your webcam

-          Criticizing on Sunday mornings, church day!

-          Shopping together where you always end up buying more than I do

-          Getting lost in Malate looking for Pan Pac because we wanted to eat at Mini Shabu Shabu

-          “Alex, Alex, puro ka na lang Alex” (a line from Alice Dixon’s movie) that, corny as it sounds, we say whenever we wanted to go to Alex III

-          That lunch we had at Edsa Shang’s Summer Palace

-          Having J.E.E. Lapids chicharon or the balot vendor’s chicha, Kropek, fish balls, etc.

-          Frequenting Balay Bacolod for its chicken, chicken skin and the free batchoy soup

-          Charming waiters at restos for more free soup

-          Sharing a Hungarian sausage at Frio Mixx

-          Trying and discovering new restos, new shops and new things

 

Despite the different time zone and the distance between us, these memories and more bring us together making it easy to pick up just anywhere we have left off.