blood and water.

water: there is a party later and i can’t decide which set to wear. although this predicament is a lot better than simply not having anything to wear, i need to distract myself before i fall into a state of style-catatonia.

enter blood: perhaps now is a good time to think about my family. everybody knows (or so i love to presume) that in my immediate family-a basic unit of this freaky society-i am the only non-dentist. I was the only one who would finish his schooling (as i already have) with out earning a d and an r before his name. nor would i be earning anything to decorate my name with (like an a, a t, a t and a y) except maybe when plugged in bylines. i cannot call myself anything as in the case of accountants and economists do. unless of course i embrace starving artist. But until then, i am simply charlie. the charlie.

blood. kin. clan.

bigger picture. in my maternal side, the same principle holds true. (with the men, at least) most of my uncles are lawyers, (One even topped the bar; his nephew, meaning me, almost did not graduate high school.) one an accountant (although non-practicing), and one an economist (graduated from the economics-honors program; again-say it with me-his nephew almost did not graduate high school.)

being the erudite bunch that they are, they totally supported my decision to take up further studies, except the fact that what I chose to study further was not law.

and now i shall appear to digress.

for somebody who sprang out of a woman who has this uber-close relationship with her siblings, i do not know my cousins well. after an arduous search, i was able to track down shadow’s site. this is what she had said:

i visited my cousins blog…and it seems very interesting…my cousins don’t know much about me…and i don’t know much about them either...they have no idea what i’ve become within the span of one summer and half a month. we haven’t contacted each other or whatsoever.

i present no counter-affidavit. she said it all.

i have only recently discovered the joys of being related to carmina and we’re starting to get considerably close. she and i know some of each other’s deep dark secrets; however, i still cannot say that we were aware of each other as we were growing up. there was no dearth of familial functions and clan shebangs. each and every holy week is spent in nueva ecija. as in all of us. in that ancient bahay-na-bato, which ironically enough, was mostly wooden in the second floor: the floor which mattered. only the dust outnumber the conwebs.

as i have said, having had this constant thing, i still couldn't say that we grew up together. this could be because this growing up for me seemed to have involved certain gender issues. knowing that you are blossoming into a flower was enough burden; nailing yourself on a scenario wherein kin is involved was just unthinkable.

the castelos are the stereotypical old-fashioned, rigid hispanic type. i am expected to act nonchalantly with having a grandmother who spent most of her youth in front of a piano inside a convent school who was married to a man responsible for the death of certain people. (oops, i’m not sure if my cousins know of this. if you are my cousin and you know that you are my cousin and you’ve just read that, then pretend it’s not there. or. pretend that we’re not cousins. whichever works for you.) testosterone is not considered a male hormone but a gene passed on to the castelo males. on the other hand, art should trickle down through the women. i care not to expound which gene i have inherited.

i too much feared the prospects of a surprise revelation concerning an adoption. or a dramatic scene where a boy is being disowned. (whichever would prove to be more convenient for them, although the latter was the more likely choice.) so i simply took a leave of absence. But now that they have discovered the perks of having a sure-fire spinster nephew, i bounce myself back into the scene. still with no titles before or after my name.


another story which involves blood:

when i was six, i caught that yucky-sounding ailment (dengue: a truly effective onomatopoeia for death) and i needed blood transfusion. although aids was not yet a hot topic at that time, my parents did not trust the bloodbank so they promptly assembled everyone they knew who had the same bloodtype as i did. (and now you know the story behind my multiple personalities: bloods of various sources copulate within my veins.) damn me should i ever forget: i literally have my father’s, his sister’s and her two children’s blood flowing within my veins. while the doctors toyed on my circulatory system, the rest of my clan religiously recited the rosary. perhaps, they even got those folks who do the extending-of-the-palm-to-the-sick-person-thingie, but i choose not to remember.

meanwhile, at home, my two little sisters mentioned to their respective yayas about seeing me talking to an angel. the yayas broke into hysterical tears, which was actually a good thing. the three of us were only a year apart from each other so our parents decided that we needed a nanny each. when we fought, our nannies would also fight. even when my sisters and i were enjoying a ceasefire, the nannies would find their own justifications for going for each other’s throats.

“i say the flower vase should go on top of the tv!.”

“you’re ruining my style!”

anything that gave our yayas something to agree on was a great contribution to humanity. and my mother, upon hearing the cute story, immediately went into her “lord, if it’s really time, then i offer my son to you” moment. her marriage to my father was almost destroyed because of this abrahamic spell.

i almost died. obviously, i didn’t. i leave it up to you to judge whether this is a good thing or not. before you cast your ballot, i want you to reflect on how screwed up i turned out to be.

posted by carl @ 4:03 AM