Fishy, Fishy

About eleven years ago, I went nuts over my MOPyfish, a virtual pet named Christina which lived in my monitor and resembled a parrot fish. Christina, like her other siblings spawned by their MOPyfish mother, was available for download from the HP website. For starters, it was completely lifelike unlike other virtual pets which looked like Looney Tunes rip-offs. It swam around the screen with graceful fins as if it were really underwater. Christina was fed everyday and I could play with her by clicking on her and she would make underwater somersaults. She had a temper, though and overclicking on her would make my MOPyfish scuttle away into some unknown corner of the monitor.

At first, a MOPyfish's tank came bare: nothing but darkness and seeming depth. But points could be acquired with printouts (hence the MOP in MOPy which meant Multiple Original Printouts). When I reached a point threshold, I'd get MOPyfish paraphernalia like a plant or aphrodisiac which made Christina hyper and give me a kiss. Eventually I learned you could download a rip for the software without a need for printouts.

The realization that Christina's lifelikeness was both a boon and a bane came later. I was on vacation with my father for a month and when I came back, the first thing I did was to rush to my computer to check on Christina. I was horrified when I found her floating on the "water surface" with her belly on the side, looking every inch like a real dead fish! It was so realistic I could almost smell the stench and my stomach lurched at the thought that a dead fish had been floating inside my computer for a month.

For virtual reality, some say the more realistic, the better. In terms of virtual fish as pets, that may not always be the case. And Christina's lifelikeness did more than just scare the socks off my toes. She bore a hole in my pocket and cost me a lot of ink. Back then, I should have realized there was indeed something fishy behind that kiss.

Rain, Randomness and Pigeons

Lately, the rain has been a constant presence in Manila's afternoons. I should have known that it was a bad idea to have the car washed and my friend Joey did give me ample warning. I was walking back to the car when I realized that the sky was clear and the sun was shining mightily with its rays outstretched like an extended slinky. So I decided to bring the car to the wash shop and as the mud and the grime started to disappear before my very eyes, I believe I made the right choice.

I spent the rest of the afternoon holed up in the debilitating coldness of the student lounge, trying to study while trying to ignore the lure of the couch. By 4 PM, rain pours down in torrents and washes away eighty pesos worth of car wash. Oh well, at least the car was clean for a couple of hours.

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I haven't been to the bookstore in about three weeks - and that's a long time considering its proximity to the place where I live along with the fact that I used to drop by the bookstore twice a week to browse through new titles, snag a few free reads and, of course, smell book paper.

On my way home, I decided to make a quick stop to my favorite place on this side of the world. After all the week had been a pain in the derriere and I did deserve a break. Besides, I could use the time to check out which books I could get with packet of gift cards I got from my parents and my GG-mates on my birthday (arguably the best gift anyone could ever get me). I did end up getting C.S. Lewis' "Till We Have Faces" and Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" and I was walking out with what could be my weekend reprieve, I looked up and saw the falling drops of rain reflected on a street lamp. Back where I'm from, old people attribute gender to a lot of things, even rain and the rain tonight perfectly fit the "male" type - small, thin pinpricks which hit the ground with silence. This was in contrast to the "female" variant which consisted of huge, fat drops which plopped like water-filled balloons erupting when hit by darts.

Maybe it was the yellow light from the lamp post against the darkness of the sky but the rain tonight seemed to fall with such softness, it almost felt wispy, lightweight, like snow piling quietly over a rooftop (not that I've actually seen snow fall but the movies do seem to show it). The raindrops looked so delicate they could have disappeared like vapor the minute they hit my "Mickey Mouse's dismembered parts" umbrella.

On my way back to the parking lot, sloshing through the street in the rain that looked like snow was practically therapeutic.

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Weird story coming up.

I think I might have a stalker.

A bunch of pigeons live somewhere in that space above the ceiling of the law school building. They practically fly over my head when I walk across the oft-deserted hallway of the third floor while toting my dismembered "Rules of Court." Sometimes, sparrows join them in some game of hide-and-seek but generally, the birds pretty much keep to themselves. That's something that I am comfortable with because I have this unexplained fear of the avian kind. Blame it on Alfred Hitchcock's "Birds" or that movie about ghosts manifesting themselves as hawks or something. The eyes scare me and the way they cock their heads in an almost robotic fashion give me the creeps.

Yesterday was a day like any other in my rather somber existence in law school. I was standing on the open area across the hall from my third floor classroom, parroting provisions I had committed to memory when I looked up to see a pigeon perched on a water pipe above me. That would have been nothing extraordinary had I not realized that the pigeon was staring at me with its unblinking little eyes! It sat on the pipe, neck unmoving as if it had bird paralysis or something and its eyes fixed on what seemed to be my face. I moved my head to the right, to the left, bobbed it forward then backward but the pigeon still sat there, staring at me intently. Then with its beady eyes still fixed on me, it started opening its pink little beak as if it was trying to say something to me, as if I could comprehend the slightest smattering of bird speak.

"Cha..." I called out to my friend. "You've got to see this. The pigeon's looking at me."

"Well, there's no reason why they they shouldn't be there. They live there, you know," Cha answered me.

"I know," I said, aware that I sounded obviously silly. Maybe all the memorization and talk about the Corfu Channel was making my synapses overheat, resulting to illusions about a white bird with a stiff neck and a hyperactive beak.

"But, really, it's staring at me...and it's opening its mouth too."

Cha looked up to the ceiling and started laughing. "You didn't see the other one?"

Bewildered, I followed her gaze. "What other one?"

True enough, there was another pigeon sitting right above my first captive audience, its head and neck somewhat snuggled into its breast yet still obviously staring at me with the same beady eyes and intent gaze.

"This isn't funny, Cha," I said as I began to move away from the ledge. What if the birds were delusional and were seeing me as a large piece of bird food? I started singing the pigeon fling its white body into me like a compies leaping into their prey. Okay, I was being ridiculous.

Cha said maybe I was channelling Snow White. Dahlia, another friend, offered an interesting suggestion which, if I did take up, was going to be as weird as having two pigeons for a captive audience - try singing "Happy Working Song" with the matching "Aaaahh-aaahh." It just might bring in more members of their flock and more bird stalkers to freak me out.

Maybe I am going insane. Or just being over-imaginative.

Weird story over. But that does not change the fact that the birds were still staring at me.

Detour

de⋅tour [dee-toor, di-toor]
–noun
1. a roundabout or circuitous way or course, esp. one used temporarily when the main route is closed.
2. an indirect or roundabout procedure, path, etc.

I don't like detours, especially when the huge yellow sign with a twisted arrow makes a surprise appearance in a place totally unfamiliar to me. When I was learning to drive in Manila and every street corner was as strange as the last one, detours scared me to the tips of my hairstrands. I then had to make use of my inner sense of direction as I'd navigate streets that were totally unfamiliar in order to find my way into a road that I would recognize.

I remember when I had to get a new OR/CR for my car two years ago in some obscure LTO branch located somewhere within the labyrinth that is Sta. Mesa. The streets were narrow, cars were parked along the sidewalk and a couple of streets were closed so I had to take one back road after another until I saw the familiar throng of jeepneys along Aurora. As I made one turn after another in those little side streets, all I could think about was getting out of that maze.

If that was one detour I never want to go through again, there is another detour I wish I relished being in. In Cebu, there was a detour we took by mistake which saw us driving through a breathtaking view of the mountains and a rushing river. But because we were in a hurry to catch a Ro-Ro to San Carlos, all I really remember about that trip was the sound of my fingers angrily drumming on the glass window of the car. All the blah about view of the mountains and the river was just something I tried to reconstruct in my head.

Last week, I turned 26 and everything about this new stick added to the little tally board welded to my brain is a detour. A couple of years back, I had plans of how things would go about at this time of my life and now, those plans are a few blocks away, obscured from my range of sight. Like jeepneys honking their horns, like a train roaring through the tracks, I can hear them, I know they're there but I can't get to them just yet because I need to get in touch with my Inner Compass and work my way through these streets.

For someone who has pretty much mapped out his destination ala the Human Genome Project, being greeted by a detour is like getting whalloped by a thousand pound animal in the face with such intensity that he starts seeing psychedelic stars dancing the cha-cha-cha before his eyes. It is easy to get carried away with the "whys" and the grunting and the whining and the complaining and the scuffling of shoes down an unknown curb. Theseus must have felt the same way as he worked his way along Minos' elaborate labyrinth had he not had Ariadne to guide him.

But no matter what a detour is, despite the extra effort, the longer distance, the expense of time, it still is a journey, no matter how short or how long it may turn out to be. And in my world, every journey thoroughly deserves to be enjoyed with all its peaks and its valleys. Though unexpected, it is littered with little packets of possibly everything which could make this walkabout worthy of every memory cell's mitochondric activity.

Everything that happens in the year that I turned 26 will all be a surprise, pretty much like Jack jumping out of the box, like getting an extra strawberry chunk in my strawberry ice cream. It is good to be in unknown territory once in a while and I easily forget that I had one of the best times of my life when I was thirteen, alone and walking around in a new city in a foreign country.

I am looking forward to a year of long walks
and even longer talks,
tough lessons for the mind
and even tougher lessons for the soul
pealing laughter to rival church bells
endless songs to sing
beautiful mornings
and even more beautiful nights

A year for bones to be broken
and dreams to be restored,
for first chances
and even more shots at a second,
for strawberries to be picked
and for grain to be sown,
for unexpected arrivals
and graceful exits.

A year of tears in battle,
perhaps more tears in victory,
for family, for friends,
and anyone else along the way,
A year for the weary minstrel
to find his song,
A year for the stream of promises,
waiting in the silence of fulfillment.

That should be enough to turn those psychedelic cha-cha-ing stars into black holes.