I am Not a Saint to be Put Up in a Pedestal

November 7, 2008 at 9:38 am (i am therefore i flirt) (, , , , , )


 

His name was DubaiBoy. The one and only time I’ve personally seen him was when he was first introduced to me as Beckham’s bestfriend from Cebu. Beckham and his friends had decided to visit the community where I was staying, for a few hours with some relatives. Beckham had decided to surprise me by visiting me right at the hospital where I was currently on 24-hour duty. I remembered laughing when I saw him and his friend peeking from behind the posts while they watched me as I wrote the admitting orders of a pediatric patient with Acute Gastroenteritis.

 

Beckham convinced me to go out of the hospital for a few hours to have dinner with him and his friends. Because there were about four of us assigned on 24-hour duty that day, I was confident that the rest of them can manage without me. I remembered my classmates teasing me when I told them I needed them to cover my patients for me because I had to sneak out for a few hours to go out with some boy.

 

As I rode in his SUV, I checked my cellphone for load and tried to see if it was fully charged. As much as Beckham had acted like a complete gentleman most of the time that I’ve been with him, I am still a girl and I had fears that I was about to be brought into some lair filled with drunk horny men who will forcefully engage me in some gang-rape. I felt slightly better knowing I had the means to make a phonecall to any one of my friends should I need them to save me.

 

A few minutes later, we arrived at the house where the rest of Beckham’s friends were. It was there that I met DubaiBoy. DubaiBoy was a talker, a heavy drinker just like Beckham and more of an extrovert compared to Beckham. He spoke to me in Tagalog with an obvious Bisayan accent. A few instances, he would ask me personal questions regarding my own views about love and past relationships. I detected a slight hint of interest and Beckham must have as well because he kept telling DubaiBoy, “Wag ka na, bro. Alam ko style mo.” I decided to ignore his subtle flirtations because it was apparent among the group that I was there as Beckham’s girl.

 

The night ended with the boys driving me back to the hospital and a certain incident than involved a USB that contains my only copy of my undergrad research I was working on, which I thought I had accidentally dropped while I was in their company and turns out to have been in my bag at the hospital the whole entire time. I didn’t hear anything from Beckham after that. I guess I must have turned him off when he saw me freak out over a stupid USB, calling him repeatedly and bugging him to check the house, the dinner table, the frontyard and his vehicle again and again for my lost USB. What do you expect? I’m a writer, a researcher and a blogger. One gigabyte of encoded information to me is like a throbbing carotid pulse to a Count Dracula.

 

And then DubaiBoy found me via Friendster.

 

He started sending me messages regularly via Friendster, one of which he took the opportunity to ask for my number. I wasn’t particularly that interested but he was very friendly and he seemed harmless so I gave it to him. He then started texting me frequently and I simply replied back out of politeness. At the back of my mind, for me, he was nothing more to me but Beckham’s friend so I better be nice to him. I don’t know what rules men have with regards to going after women your friend used to be interested in but I guess, things were quite okay between the two of them since I never heard from Beckham the whole time that DubaiBoy was courting me.

 

Until his text messages started containing the words, “I miss you” “I care about you so much” and “I am inlove with you.”

 

He had this habit of texting me long 5-part messages including short stories or the complete lyrics of a different love song everyday. As in, COMPLETE lyrics. He would call me up on the phone and talk to me about how he was missing my voice. He would attempt to text me using my own dialect, when I myself rarely texted using my dialect (It takes double the time to type in the local dialect as compared to simple English or Tagalog). I felt slightly creeped out by his courtship and would have simply ignored him if not for the fact that I knew he was really a nice guy who is just genuinely interested in the wrong person.

 

I don’t like courtships. No, scratch that. I don’t like the fakeness of courtships. I don’t like unnatural attempts of showing someone that you like them. I preferred spontaneity, those subtle flirtations interjected between normal conversations, skipping that awkward phase of making good impressions and putting your best foot forward and heading straight to letting that person see and accept you for who you really are and not for who you pretend to be. I don’t like going through that stage where the guy puts you in a pedestal as he tries to prove everything in his power that he is worthy of you. I am not a saint. I do not walk with clouds under my feet nor a halo behind my head. Instead, I like a man who can confidently tell me, “This is who I really am. Take it or leave it,” or after weeks of being a friend, he finds the perfect opportunity to steal a quick kiss from my lips.

Hence, as much as most women would have found DubaiBoy’s wooing strategies sweet, for me, it was just corny and overstated.

 

So I told him I’ve started seeing someone else. It was too easy to lie to him, he was courting me via long-distance, from Cebu. He told me that whoever the guy is, that guy was extremely lucky to have me, that he will continue praying for me, and that he hopes I will be very happy, etcetera. He disappeared from my cellphone inbox for a few months, except for the occasional messages we exchanged through my Friendster, until I found out recently that he had gone abroad to work as a nurse. He still calls long-distance occasionally, still tells me that one day he will play his guitar and sing a love song for me via phone call.

 

And how could it be that I still am not interested?

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Young, Drunk, and Holding Hands to a little Yeng Constantino

October 14, 2008 at 7:55 am (i am therefore i flirt) (, , )

4:00 PM
It was a lazy Friday afternoon. I honestly wanted to waste my night just surfing the Internet. I had just woken up from my post-24-hour hospital duty nap and I intended to spend it lazily at home, in my most comfortable shorts and T-shirt. But then, a classmate of mine from medical school who was also one of my housemates at the community started the cascade of tonight’s events:

Wer on our way hom. Cocolee has sum pipol he wants u girls 2 mit

I wanted to hide.

I’ve been set up by friends so many times I was probably a master in blind dates. And it always ends the same. We remain nothing but acquaintances. Occasionally, I bump into one during my nights out and I sometimes pretend that I don’t see him or I hide, afraid to find out if he even remembered me. One in particular just disappeared out of the face of my inbox without any warning only to see his Friendster default pic a month later with him and his new girlfriend posing infront of his cellphone cam.

But I disgress.

So, the guys arrived and I finally met Beckham, the one my classmates were apparently setting me up with. I reluctantly entertained the guy for my classmates’ sake. In all fairness, it surprised me that he wasn’t actually as bad as I expected. He wasn’t shy but he wasn’t very talkative either, which was a good thing because I usually get bored with shy guys who don’t talk and I could not tolerate guys who are too talkative. I don’t like it when you have uncomfortable gaps of silence and I absolutely hate the skipping rope conversations: The ones wherein you’re just waiting for the other person to catch his breath in between sentences, just so you can inject your own lines into the conversations.

He wasn’t from around here and was only in town to celebrate the festivities for the day with his cousins and relatives, whom he was currently staying with. He was two years younger than me and physically, okay… he was quite good-looking, I admit.

This could be interesting, I said to myself.

6:00 PM
Despite my adamant protests of not wanting to get out of the house, my classmates were still able to drag me out of it, into the guy’s SUV, and into the house of his relatives for a scrumptious dinner. Beckham took it upon himself to be an ever-attentive host as he personally served me various utensils, presented me with viands and made sure I was not without drinks. He continued to regal me with tales about his hometown, his college days, even his highschool days before dinner and during the post-dinner drinking session. My ever-familiar friend-slash-foe, Emperador Brandy, was the choice drink of the night. Remembering how much I had gotten acquainted with our toilet bowl because of this traitorous friend-slash-foe, I knew I was going to have to pass up the alcohol shots if I wanted to continue making a good impression.

But not after downing at least one glass though.

I kind of have a love-hate relationship with Emperador Brandy. So, sue me.

10:00 PM
People always said that when you talk to a drunk guy, he will always tell you the truth. I honestly had no idea if he was telling me the truth. I couldn’t believe that he too believed that one’s youth should be spent experiencing the good as well as the bad, for the simple purpose of not having any regrets when one gets old and looks back on how he lived his youth. It seemed impossible to me that he too watched the same cheesy soap opera as I did and that his favorite movie was “If Only,” a major tear-jerking chick-flick, which also turns out to be one of my favorite movies. I couldn’t believe we had so much in common that I had to keep myself from asking him, “Are you for real?”


He loved talking to me, So much so that we spent the night talking animatedly to each other, away from the rest of our friends. Not that I’m bragging but I can usually carry great conversations. I knew I wasn’t exceptionally drop-dead gorgeous, and not that 36-24-36 kind of sexy either, so I always try to make up for what I lack physically by making a guy comfortable enough when talking to me. And when the guy knows how to carry a good conversation himself, it usually makes for a very interesting thing I like to call “chemistry.”

I think the plan backfired.

Somewhere along the road, he had gotten too sodden enough that we were conversing as if we haven’t just met a few hours ago but more like months or years. This newly found closeness that he had conjured up in his mind was evident with the way he maneuvered the conversation to rapid transitions of anecdotes about his Nursing hospital duties, his past girlfriends, his feelings towards me, his haircut, his highschool teachers and even to sleeping together. I was pleased, flattered, embarrassed, uncomfortable and freaked out at the same time. It amused me to no end that he seemed to be the male version of myself two years ago. Only intoxicated. It would have been a good thing since I can’t resist someone who lives by the same principles as I did, except for the fact that he was totally incapacitatingly inebriated. Inexplicably wading deep sh*t in the throes of alcohol drunkenness.

Beckham was so relaxed and comfortable around me that by the end of the night, he was talking to me with his face practically six inches within my own face. There was really some serious invasion of private bubble space. When we sat down side by side, my upper arm was practically in his chest and the side of my breast was close to brushing his upper arm. I never minded really but I wasn’t that comfortable either. Contrary to what most people will think, I am not THAT liberated. What made the situation more amusing was when he started holding my hands, swaying them while walking, as if we have been boyfriend-girlfriend for a long time.

Add that to the fact that we were doing so infront of my landlord’s teenage children who supposedly looked up to me as a role model, my conservative housemates and the class’ two worst jokesters of all time, who will never make me live this experience down for as long as they lived. I was incredibly embarrassed and just wanted to stand in the middle of the highway and wait for a passing bus to hit me, most especially when one of the jokesters started singing a song made popular by Yeng Constantino.

“Hawak-kamay… Di kita iiwan sa paglakbay… “ (Holding hands… I will never leave you on your journey…)

Arghhh…

And to think, I wasn’t even drunk.

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