Your Actions in Life Will Reflect in Eternity

Total Asia Swineflu Mask Count: 16
Portion of which found at the airport: 7

Once upon a time I went to Asia, made a lot of swineflu jokes, came back, and was afflicted with cough, runny nose, and slight raise in body temperature. Swineflu. is not. a joke.
(no, it totally still is)

Right now I'm trying to fix my jetlag. Last night I slept from 6pm-11:30, and I've been up since, and now I have that stinging headache you get when your body is just pissed that you've been up on the computer all night and you're not sleeping and you have swineflu.

I feel like I have a lot of things to say about the Philippines, but a proper recap post will never actually materialize. I turned into sort of an introvert over there, I think I lived a lot in my head and just stared out into the strange world around me and had conversations with myself. This resulted in a lot of observational-type writing, since 1) it is my favorite, and 2) it was all I could really do...observe. It feels like a weird shift from when I started this blog ranting about gender and sexuality and societal norms. Does anyone have strong feelings about this? Can I get some feedback? Maybe that's a school thing. Maybe I'm several different people, or at the very least several different writers. I'm nervous about this going back to school thing that's happening in less than three weeks. I'm not really sure who I became over the summer, or if I became anyone at all, or if everyone else became something and I didn't, or vice versa. Different post for a different time.

Hey look, here's this!

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'YOUR ACTIONS IN LIFE WILL REFLECT IN ETERNITY' is what the billboard said on the way to Makati. It wasn’t in front of a church, like a fun fact or a quick tip for eternal salvation. It wasn’t “Jesus is the way, the truth, the light” illuminating the side of a building, turning it all neon and glowing and casting a dim, colored light over Manila’s chronic traffic jams. Its letters were arranged, all caps, on what seemed to be the header of a former movie theater, as if weary traveling souls could stop in and have their 120-minute salvation session accompanied by popcorn and soda. I wish this was a movie. I wish it was the vehicle for Vin Diesel’s comeback.

I also wonder if there ever was a statement simultaneously truer to those with belief and more false to those without, though its something we wished were true. We wished it were true knowing that nothing survives an eternity, not even our own, knowing that eventually we’d all bend to question marks, then fade, and then what? Just a movie billing. Just a shrug.

-candles
-manila paper
-safety pins
-pastries
-cake
-postcards
-twister fries
-priest

We’ve been sent on an absurd scavenger hunt, my cousin and I. Today is the blessing of her family’s new house, and we’ve been made responsible for picking up all necessary supplies. And nothing is more necessary to a house blessing than a priest. The car ride is long because Manila traffic is notoriously unforgiving. Bumper to bumper at any and all times of day, drivers so aggressive that when it loosens up even bus drivers navigate their monolithic vehicles by weaving between cars. What do you listen to in the car with a priest? We think Coldplay. We’re not sure why. I don’t have any Coldplay on my iPod. I think this means I’m not meant to hang out with priests.

He’s wearing plaid, and this confuses me because I sometimes forget that priests are also people, and people sometimes wear plaid. He’s wearing a plaid shirt and faded blue jeans made of that really resilient material and he speaks loudly and gruffly as he laughs and tells us about barkless dogs and gives us advice on convenience stores where we can buy alcohol. He is not at all like the priests I've known in the States. They are old and stern and do not like plaid. They furrow their brows and move slowly and take careful, agonizing steps, their shoes are weighed down by the heaviness of soles. They do not know where I can buy cheap beer.

By the time the house creeps up on us, Gaby and I are singing along to the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back,” I am wondering how this song manages to seep into my life at all junctures and how, in every sense of the phrase, we've gotten to this point. Father Ben is happily tapping along in the front seat. Maybe he wants to hear “Billie Jean.”

The house is extravagant, beautiful, sweeping in that cold, modern sort of way. High ceilings, ever-expanding white interiors, stone floors, walls of windows like eyes dumbstruck and gazing into the abandoned house next door. It’s not yet been furnished. Six cardboard-wrapped chairs are lined up in the living room, and the granite dining table stretches the length of the dining room, flanked by plastic patio chairs. The workers tape our manila paper to the windows, obscuring the view. “The theme of tonight’s party is ‘Furniture Warehouse,’” says Gaby. She motions to the scaffolding outside the door, the pile of construction rubble on her front lawn. “Deconstruction under construction. Post-modern. Deep.” These are the kind of jokes you make when everyone you’re related to is an architect

Father Ben enters the house, shaking hands with our grandparents who sit demurely in the barely-furnished living room. He opens up his backpack and takes out his priestly robes, throwing them over his plainclothes. Oh, okay. There we go. Phew.

We’re lined up in the doorway, all of us. The air conditioners have yet to be functional, and in this short span of time, we’ve learned to gather in the corridor that runs straight from the front door to the dining room at the very back of the house. It’s breezy, which is relieving, unless you’re trying to light candles for a blessing, which we are. We’re jammed into the doorway and cannot focus on what I'm sure were Father’s sagacious words about hospitality and family and home. We’re too busy hovering over our candles, hands cupped over flames, shielding the flickering, flailing, frantic little lives on top of the wicks. My candle is out, we whisper. Can I light off yours? Oh, it’s out too. What’s he saying? Does this blessing still count if we’re just holding wax sticks?

Maybe it will be better once we’re in the house, like really in the house. We follow Father through the rooms as he sprinkles Holy Water over the Furniture Warehouse. He leads us in prayers, incantations, a repeated murmur of the Hail Mary. He loses some of us along the way. My grandparents can’t climb up the stairs, the train of people is too long to navigate the tight U-turns in the hallways. Didn’t we go into this room already? I’m waiting in the kitchen next to the KFC.

How are you even supposed to hold candles? Who the fuck forgot to get the paper to catch the wax? Oh, right.

I wince and swear as the wax drips over my fingers, down my wrist, onto my exposed feet.
And I remember that time I watched drops of wax turn opaque and harden on your chest. And how you gasped and grabbed my collar when your skin burned because I was new and clumsy and held the candle a little too close. And how, though I was intrigued by the flame, I knew I could never even try because my pain threshold was too low and besides, what had just happened to you made me feel nervous and stupid.

When did it happen that in my mind, that everything in my life turns to sex? I wonder if this is something like growing up or if I’m having a really prolonged adolescence or maybe I just watch too much TV. I’m like an explicit Midas. Straw to gold, blessings to sex. I wonder what’s with this business of turning things, transforming them. I wonder if this means growing up, and that maybe it's just nothing more than gracelessly executed alchemy.