not the same old songs
Went karaoke-ing with Carl, Vin, El, Andrew, and Charles last night, and Charles sang! To those of you who don't know him, Charles is a self-proclaimed 'vampire orchid', who, aside from not eating, not drinking, and not breathing (Ask El!), also does not generally sing. So to have him voluntarily choose to belt out three or four songs was veritably the highlight of the evening.

Of course, there was a lot more fun had all around, particularly the duet version of 'Rock DJ' in El's trademark boy band tones and Andrew's rocker growl, Vin and El's literally breathless rendition of 'Goodbye', and Carl's always awesome vocal stylings. Much missed were Dean, Dino, and Tobie, since no one present was actually mad enough to attempt singing the random BeeGees song that popped up by mistake.


sorrow and glee
Earlier, we cruised Fully Booked, where I wandered around sadly clutching a couple of books I couldn't afford to buy: The Crimson and the White and The Food Taster. Poor junkie me, I just never have enough money to support my terrible book habit... Next time a client pays up, I'm heading straight for Rockwell.

I got to see my best girl friend, Jen, who coincidentally was also hanging out at Rockwell; after which my guys and I (including Camy, El's lovely lass) hung out in front of Monk's Dream to play a new game, Thingamajig. Out of four rounds, Camy won two and I won one, leaving the poor male-type creatures in the dust. Must be tough, having two heads and only one brain... :P


Post-Partum Digression: part 6 of an 11-part essay

The Fifth Month

Several inches of waistline expansion later, I was wandering around Megamall, wondering why retailers uniformly seemed to believe that pregnancy unhinged a woman’s mind, creating in her a mad passion for all garments ruffled, bowed and beribboned, not to mention (ugh) pink. Was I—a person who could count on her fingers the non-black items in her wardrobe—going to have to spend the next four months looking like someone’s wedding cake? I imagined a vast underground conspiracy to make all expectant mothers easily identifiable, possibly even with concentration camp-type serial numbers cunningly stitched into the lacework of our unsuspecting sailor collars.

What I was really doing, of course, was focusing on an external concern (however frivolous) in a vain attempt to ignore the suspiciously tender feelings I was beginning to harbor toward the tiny being that was just starting to make itself known inside of me.

The baby had started kicking.

I had been lying around in bed, remembering the days back when I could read on my belly, and bidding a fond farewell to my toes, which had just begun to disappear behind my expanding midsection mound. Then, without warning, I felt something—something kind of like indigestion, except not painful; like digging a knuckle into your skin, except on the inside; like a throbbing headache, except short-lived and in the stomach area. In other words, it was something not quite like anything I’d ever felt before.

I’d felt phantom kicks many times previously—little tummy twitches that, I’d thought, might have been the baby. I’d even started to worry about being some kind of emotional retard, because the sensations had so far failed to produce in me that rush of wonder, love, and pride that TV and movies had informed me were de rigeur when that particular milestone occurred.

“You’ll know it when you feel it,” my sister-in-law had told me, a statement which I then dismissed as just another Mommy Saying (more on these later). Now that it had happened, however, I knew it absolutely and unquestionably.

“The baby moved,” I whispered to Dean, feeling as absurdly smug as if this were some kind of death-defying feat I had achieved by myself.

“It did?!” he asked excitedly, and put his hand on my no-longer-quite-covered-by-pajama-tops belly. Naturally, the baby then chose to keep utterly still, leaving Dean straining to feel any kind of abdominal activity at all, and me wondering just how long I ought to wait before asking him to give up and stop blocking my view of my treasured toes.

Just as we were dropping off to sleep, however, the baby obligingly chose to move again, an infinitesimal nudge, probably to say, “Get your heavy hand off me, please, Father, I’m trying to sleep.”

Even so, “The baby moved!” Dean exclaimed, gazing at me with as much awe as if I were, indeed, bearing the Second Coming of the Christ Child. Heck, who could blame him? I felt like the Holy Mother myself. Notwithstanding the fact that pregnant women around the world had experienced this exact same thing since time immemorial, I felt as wondrous, loving, and proud as if I had just invented the light bulb. Or the telephone. Or at least that special glue they use on Post-Its.