I am Not a Saint to be Put Up in a Pedestal
November 7, 2008 at 9:38 am (i am therefore i flirt) (Beckham, bestfriends, courtship, DubaiBoy, friendster, language barrier)
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?
The Language Barrier
October 14, 2008 at 9:17 am (i am therefore i flirt) (dating, language barrier, Mr.Bisaya, textmate)
Darna, a classmate of mine from medical school who was currently in a long-term relationship with her boyfriend after EngineerBoy, was just like the rest of the classmates in my batch who were in committed relationships. She found it her responsibility to set up the single girls in the class with her equally single male friends. Hence, Mr.Bisaya.
Mr.Bisaya was her boyfriend’s ex-landlord. He came from a rich family who originally hailed from Cebu. Because of his work, he moved to the provinces and was currently living at some boarding house with some friends. Darna gave my number to him and we started texting. Because he was of a different cellular network, I didn’t reply as much as I would have wanted to… Yes, I can be such a cheapskate sometimes. Well, it wasn’t as if he knocked my socks off with his text messages anyway.
Because I was bored and curious about him, I plotted on how I can find the opportunity to finally meet him. I was going home soon for a short weekend vacation from the community. Mr.Bisaya lived somewhere between the community and home. I told him I would be stopping by his area since I needed to catch another bus and that we should meet. He agreed.
I met up with him at a local fastfood joint. He was short, well-built (from all the tennis playing, I suppose) and average-looking. He was nice, yes, but he didn’t knock my socks off.
There was a major language barrier considering that he speaks in Cebuano (which is something like a deeper version of the local Bisaya) and although most Cebuanos can carry a good conversation with the local Bisayans and vice versa, I, on the other hand, can’t understand nor speak Cebuano. Although I do understand a little of the local Bisaya, that is, if you don’t talk too fast enough for me, I can barely speak the language. My Bisaya-speaking abilities is basically limited to the following medically-related phrases:
“Unsa imong gibati karon?” (How do you feel today?)
“Ginhawa lalum.” (Breathe deeply.)
“Kini imong tambal, imuhang ilumnon tulu ka beses sa usa ka adlaw, usa ka semana.”
(This is your medicine. You drink it three times a day for one week.)
And I am not even going to start ranting about my Tausug. It’s just sooo darn embarrassing enough – for someone who lived majority of her life around Muslims – that I can’t even make one coherent sentence in Tausug.
So, Mr.Bisaya and I ended up sign-languaging. LOL. Kidding… Actually, he spoke in Bisaya while I spoke in Tagalog interspersped with occasional Bisayan terms, in the hopes that we can both understand each other. I finally realized that it’s incredibly difficult to be your true self with someone who doesn’t speak the same language as you do. You find yourself unable to crack jokes and show him your great sense of humor, which is basically what I usually do during first dates… Yes, I don’t take life too seriously. So sue me… You find yourself drastically thinking and rethinking the things that come out of your mouth. My cerebral faculties goes on hyperspeed as it tries to catch up with the Tagalog-English conversations in my head, translating as much of it into Bisaya, and then leaving everything in God’s will as I let my lips and tongue enunciate the words as correctly as I can, hopefully without butchering the dialect.
It was no surprise that I ended up with a major headache.
I must have been a sadist in my past life because apparently I loved torturing myself and he was able to angle a second date from me after that. I spent one very wholesome night with him the next time. On my way to the community, I stopped by his area after a short weekend vacation at home and we had dinner, drinks and listened to some local acoustic one-man band show which he loved and I didn’t but didn’t tell him (The band was singing my grandfather’s favorite songs, for God’s sake!). We ended up checking in at a room at some hotel and sleeping on separate beds. There was certainly no canoodling in the middle of the night and neither did I give him any impression that I wanted him to sneak into bed with me.
I don’t really know if he wanted me to though and frankly, I didn’t care.
As much as I would have loved to torture myself with migraine brought about by English-Bisayan translations, I didn’t think that it was going to work. We ended up on another date, this time with Darna, her boyfriend and some of Mr.Bisaya’s friends. Maybe he was becoming more comfortable with me because all their teasing finally brought out his caring and occasionally flirty side, but at that point, I really just wasn’t feeling it. We started communicating less and less until a year or so later I found out he got some girl pregnant and ended up marrying her.
I was okay with it. He wasn’t worth all those headaches anyway. Seriously.
