afritada / late night dinner
This short story has a fragmented history. - xanana
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Ingredients/ 1 kilo chopped chicken. 2 cans tomato sauce. 3 potatoes, sliced. 3 carrots, sliced. 2 green bell peppers, sliced. 1 cup oil. 2 tsp sugar. 1 bulb onion. 1 clove garlic. Salt and pepper to taste.
Red is a nice color, don’t you think? I love the way it livens up my kitchen tiles. Oops, I forgot. Our kitchen tiles. It’s been three years since we had this house to ourselves. I remember kissing you in all places uncovered with articles of clothing. You were only in a soiled white tank and house shorts torn at the crotch lines then. In any case, you looked hot. Putting your presence side by side with this house, you’d have 10,000 pogi points to your name. Of course, now, I only know the nearness of you through these red tiles. Fiery red. Shock-rock red. Slut red. Scarlet red. Warms me up any way. Too warm, perhaps, with this boiling oil on my skin.
My potatoes and carrots run from my torn plastic bag to the aluminum sink. I take hold of what I could catch, two potatoes and a carrot. Suddenly I remember how you made me so proud of my pineapples then, back in my father’s farm. Too bad I couldn’t add pineapples here. Even tomatoes had to be squashed. But I don’t mind. This is for you anyway. I’ll have my pineapples and lanzoneses as you make love to the bed.
My hair ruffles with the smoke of now-burning oil, but I don’t care. My skin cooks itself in oiled sweat in the process, to hell with it. This has to be perfect. In any way possible. I slice the potatoes, carrots, and bell peppers like I always do. Thick, and haphazardly elongated. With the utmost care. You wouldn’t want to eat just the sauce, would you?
Step one/ Sauté garlic and onion in hot oil.
I crack open this garlic clove, peel the skins with my French-tipped nails, and use the marble mortar to grind them up. I know it would make my hands smelly and you wouldn’t want to kiss and lick its tips like you used to, but I know I’d make up for it with a perfect dinner. I know you won’t mind. You’ll even want to lick my hands over and over. Garlic is pungent; but admit it, you’d eat it even if it would kill you, right? Garlic is even an aphrodisiac, right? Right.
Now with the onions; I take out a bulb, peel it with my nails, again. And chop it up nice and slow. I’m not cooking anything else, just our dinner. I need nicely minced onions. Then I tear up. But I guess I need it, my face has been dehydrated for so long anyway. Hell if I could bottle your saliva, I would’ve done it long ago.
My oil is burning. Smoke blurs my vision. I open the windows and stash the garlic and onion in the wok. Kitchen clears up quite dramatically. I look at my nails. I stare at the floor for a second. Then I decide to wear gloves.
Step two/ Add chicken. Add salt and pepper. Simmer for 5 minutes.
I take out the chicken from the plastic wrapper, and realize I had the butcher chop it three hours before. I take the largest breast, redolent with its own juice, take off my gloves in one hand, and begin to stroke the skin. Hard. Then I touch my nape. My hand moves to my neck, until it reaches my collarbone, finally stopping at my cleavage, redolent with sweat.
Suddenly realizing the mess I made to my body, I dump every piece of chicken onto the wok, wooden spatula coercing the group to socialize with the garlic and onion duet. I shower the batch with salt (2 pinches) and pepper (half pinch). Spatula swims with group one more time. Stop. Cover wok. I set my cellphone’s alarm to 5 minutes. I turn on the radio. Annie Lennox’s ‘No more I Love Yous’ playing. Language is leaving me in silence, changes are shifting outside something, she says. I stroke my breasts once more and do back-up caterwauling, while looking at the dogs from my window. Mimi is fucking another son of a bitch, again.
Step three/ Add tomato sauce and ½ cup water.
I get back to the blue-and-predominantly-yellow supermarket bag to find the can of tomato sauce I expertly chose from all the dented-and-bent others in the aisle. From the drawers I produce a semi-rusted can opener and push the sharp pointed end against the top of the can. Takes me a while to get the opener to travel around the can, but I stop as three-quarters of the tin gets ripped. I try to lift the torn lid, but apparently I’m in no good terms with tin tonight as I rip the skin of my index finger, blood building up. By instinct, I suck my finger. Red has a nice taste. Mellow, yet penetrating.
By the finger’s instinct, I no longer feel the sting. I now feel in my mind, your lips pressing in my fingers with mine. I’m used to opening cans of tomato sauce every night, but surprisingly, I hurt myself just now. Language is leaving me, again. I can’t explain. I just have to finish the routine. The same nightly routine, no fail. Dump every drop of tomato sauce onto the wok. Don’t leave anything hanging. Good. Take a cup. Half-fill with water. Dump it in. I wonder if I had my blood mixed in somewhere.
Step four/ Add potatoes, carrots, and bell pepper.
No matter what I do, even with different brands of tomato sauce, I still can’t get the color of my slut-red tiles in my afritada sauce. You won’t mind, right? Oh, you don’t know. Good. Better that way. I distract this fault instead with color. I dump the potatoes in. I smile. I dump the carrots in. I smile wider. I dump the green bell pepper in. I look up the ceiling, then to the quaint crucifix somewhere above the curtain fixture. I see my eyes somewhere in that bronzy sculpture, smiling with distress. But I distract myself anyway, with my wok getting colorful. Remember that art class before where we first met? You were so in love with color, you won me over? I was always the black leather type, but something in your mismatched rainbows scraped the leather off me. I always loved your portraits of me, with my candlelight-blue hair, orange skin, and pink eyes. But you never do that anymore. I always wonder when you’ll paint me a portrait of my afritada. You won’t even need a mismatched rainbow palette for that anyway. You won’t even have to think; it’s all laid out for you.
I keep my portraits too, you know. This is the only masterpiece I’ve got, in several repetitions. But unlike yours, I never had to just look. It’s something more than that to bring it to life. Lips dripping with it, fast forward to a smile is worth more to me than an expensive frame or a high-profile exhibit, with lips dripping with sallow bubbly. But you don’t know that. So I look at that crucifix again. And look away. And cover my wok. And head upstairs and bathe.
Step five/ Let stand for 15 minutes
Dripping wet from the shower, I open my closet. And pull out a little black silk dress, gleaming against the fluorescent light. I finish the ensemble with a pair of black stilettos. I spray on the perfume you gave me three weeks ago. With no note, no wrapper, nothing. But I’ve been okay with it. It’s like telling me I smell like vanilla, and I should forever smell that way. Sweet. I appreciate your quiet honesty. I know for a fact I can only open your mouth and hear your voice in bed. But even that I now barely remember.
I fasten my damp, wavy locks with a pair of black chopsticks. I guess I can now look like a geisha without even trying. I finish with a swipe of lip gloss. Plum. Sweet. Then I walk down the stairs, imagining my first prom night with you. Except now only time can fetch me and tell me I look radiant, for you’re not around anyway. I head to the kitchen, and turn off the stove.
Step six/ Serve.
I am now on the verge of making love to this chair. I may have to use this red wine bottleneck in place of you shoving happiness in me. The candles are melting. The thin lights are losing their dimness. I must have stared at them for too long.
Beep. Beep. Doorbells are music.
I walk to the door. I clutch my breast, hard. I fear what might happen next. But my silk dress might ruffle. As a matter of fact, it already is. So I grab the doorknob instead. But I don’t see you. I don’t see any semblance of you. I now stand face-to-face with a stranger masked in black pantyhose. With a gun. Hard and loaded. I know it because it clicks. Loudly. I walk back, my stilettos in silent opposition. I stumble backwards. Unzipping his jeans, he takes off the pantyhose. Gun still pointed at me, slightly crossing the creases of my dress, imperial silk still gleaming against the thin lights. And then Gun slowly climbs to my chest. To my neck. To my chin. In slow succession, at the expense of my speeding heartbeat, Gun now smothers my face, skirts my powdered cheeks, stains my plum lips. And it stops there.
My lips must have dropped; Gun makes its way to my tongue. Slowly. Playfully. My mascara-filled eyelashes curtsy back; I see a semblance of your face, with your potato complexion, your carrot nose, and mismatched rainbows all over your head. I could’ve stopped and looked. Yours has those rough edges like most movie stars I adored with a bottleneck. But I couldn’t. Gun pulls me back, playfully teasing my plum lips. Holding it hostage, Gun shoos language away. I lean back.
As if I have any choice. I’m held at gunpoint.
My afritada is getting cold. But if it’s any consolation, I now see red tiles covering the carpeted floor both of us are enveloped against. Must be peripheral vision, but I can’t stop to verify. I don’t want to stop and verify. They look so red. Scarlet red. Slut-red, if you may. Red is a nice color, don’t you think? Like my kitchen tiles. Oops, I forgot. Our kitchen tiles.
repost: on the tuition increase.
in june last year, i wrote the post below displaying my intense opposition to the tuition increase. the reason is pretty obvious: up is a goddamn state university, therefore the burden of subsidizing it falls squarely on the shoulders of the state. there is no negotiation, no compromise. it's provided for in the 1987 constitution. and no one ever questions the constitution.
then again, that's not exactly the case now.
not only has the up board of regents (made up, in bulk, by malacañang appointees) betrayed the up community by deliberately uninviting and misleading the student and faculty regent to the unorthodoxly-set bor meet (friday, noon, right before the cancelled lantern parade), it has also, in effect, railroaded the eventual and (almost) complete state abandonment of education.
sure, not all people get to go to college, especially if you can't sustain the lifestyle changes it demands. but everyone should never be denied access to state subsidized tertiary education. up serves as the last resort for most students who cannot afford commercialized colleges. it's mandated to be one, and its integrity as a STATE university should never be marred by a cheap attempt by the BOR to get a quick buck by jacking up tuition 300 percent.
i was figuratively leafing through my previous blog entries, and i found this one below, written june 30, 2006. i didn't edit it or even update the events that took place as i wrote it, precisely for the reason that the arguments i posited in the article - however vitriol-filled the language i used for it was - still are my arguments until now.
by the way, since the decision has not been technically "ratified," we iskolars ng bayan still can do something to turn this around. especially for us who know people who are still in high school, with dreams of going to up but can't realize it because of the astronomical costs these tuition hikes will bring, it's time for us not to betray them. there's a january 24 mobilization that will come to a head in quezon hall, and this is one occasion where we can show these Board pipsqueaks that they might hold the highest policy-making body in the university, but we UP students and faculty have the greater power to turn things around.
it has been done before. diliman commune, the collapse of sb 2587, the reintroduction of the nstp program. there is no reason why it should not work now.
xanananananananana
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oh. my. god. something that hasn't happened in more than 16 years is bound to happen again. the up board of regents is planning to jack up tuition rates by more than 200 percent.
if the bor gets its way, incoming up freshmen will have to pay P1,000 per unit in up diliman (where i go to school, byy the way). which, by the way, is waaaay far from the current P300. so if right now, the average tuition for a up student is P5,400 for an 18-unit load, the tenetative charge for the next year's up freshman would more or less go to P18,000 or more, if he/she wants to take in more units.
now this might look puny to the six-digit tuition other students may have at the ateneo, la salle or ua&p, and you might buy in the stupid argument that the government does not have enough money to provide for education. but let me stop playing devil's advocate here and tell you why this could just be the biggest sin the bor can commit against the up community, and by association, the country.
first of all, up is a state university. meaning, the government should provide for the university. like, allot a budget. and if the government in question is decent/effective enough, it should place education on top of its priorities. but with the fucked-up government we have right now (lorded by that shorty parrot over there who has no sense of discretion or conscience), the only excuse up students have been getting is that the government has no money.
yeah right.
how about putting more than 80 percent (this is a 2005 figure; not sure about the final statistics for this year) of the national budget to paying ONLY the country's interest in world bank-imf loans? and how about putting the remainder to it to the military? and how about the last morsels of it to corruption and "presidential funds," which mostly go to the cronies? and where the hell does education factor in this picture. ask the kids who had to hold umbrellas when they go to class.
however, under any and all circumstances, the government is under obligation, whether it likes it or not, to fund education as a human right. the government has no right to condone, worse to instigate, the commercialization of education. bwecause then it would only benefit those who have the money to do so.
second (addendum to the last point), education is a universal human right, that's why state universities such as up exist. and being a state u, it caters to all social classes. if you introduce higher tuition, how is it supposed to benefit the students who have to take out loans now that tuition is still at 300? what are they supposed to do? drop out? quit? file an indefinite leave? whore themselves? where's your mandate in that picture?
third, if the justification is that the fees will be "at par" with that of more exclusive schools, it's total bullshit. you cannot measure education by the size of your school bill, in the same vein that you cannot measure the intelligence of a child by the size of his/her parents' bank account. if the goal is to keep the university at par with the others that it's always comaring itself with, why waste your time with such artificial/cosmetic change? it's like repainting the facade of the up health service just to make it look like it can do brain surgery now. it's preposterous at best, insipid at worst.
and fifth, it sets a precedent. if they can raise tuition like that, then they can raise labfees like that. sooner or later, they can have an sb 2587-ish charter ratified in congress and relieve the government of its obligations. and then the university will no longer be any more respectable than the diploma mill colleges advertised and scattered all over the metro.
the last time such a drastic tuition increase took place was in 1989, when then up president edgardo angara (never forget the name) jacked up tuition from P40 to P300. more than 500 percent! atty. victor avecilla (my mass media law professor at cmc, and one of the people i greatly respect) filed a case against the bastards, but the supreme court ruled on angara's favor. the not-so-original rationale was that the fee increase was supposed to put up at par with ateneo and foreign universities, and because the budget was going down.
but if you want to get back the teachers who left, the facilities that have disintegrated with disuse, give the students better quality education, we go back to the core argument: IT'S THE GOVERNMENT'S RESPONSIBILITY TO PROVIDE FOR EDUCATION. BECAUSE EDUCATION IS A UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHT. say no to budget cut!
all of this, while i attended a book launch at the university of the philippines press, where the academic elite were there and the new logo (which i didn't really like. i like the alibata logo better) revealed. they acted as if up was your typical brady bunch university where all is bright, happy and gay. i wanted to strangle them one by one, but i had to keep my composure.
putang ina bakit nila ginagawa sa atin ito?
xanananananananana
getting to know you
Today, you will not notice me passing you by.
Too preoccupied with your own thoughts, you will not give a moment to glide your back my way as I make some room for myself to walk on. But I will not hunch over and pretend you are God. I will still put my chin up and walk through your path, or the path that will hold me nearer to you, whichever comes first.
My eyes, the brown of which fading to a noticeable cashew with every year added to my resume, will be covered in glass for added sparkle. My long and rumpled hair, white streaks on which gaining companions with every day added to my work schedule, will not pose a threat to your stick-straight locks. It will just kill it with ease. As cliché as it sounds, rumpled hair with a macho yet bohemian stance, I like to believe, gains more pogi points than a clean-cut straight-haired kid with absolutely no sense of culture. Or at least my bias to the artsy-fartsy side of it
But I do not believe in pogi points for the sake of getting it, just the same as appreciating or making art for art’s sake. I call to higher motives, higher intentions, higher desires. Vanity is all about fitting in, right? And vanity only speaks of approval from others, am I not filibustering? With Interest comes Appreciation. And Interest lays the tracks to Respect. Unfortunately, Love railroads it. But do not tell me you didn’t like the idea.
But you will not think about those things as you casually flail your eyes past me. You will not even think of anything, I suppose. Anything, of course, except keeping that black hair straight. Which I can kill with my rumpled set with perfect ease.
But you will see the colorful chains constricting my wrist. Those colorful wooden cuffs, increasingly closing in on my hands, ruling it, admonishing it not to do anything, to not be anything. Just be. You will look closer without really moving a step, and see that the Hands cradling those chains have given up in completely killing it. The Hands are now like rogue prisoners, locked and chainballed. You will want to take them off me, to finally set those prisoners free on parole on a fault not exactly their own; but you will not try it yourself.
You will look at me from Rumpled hair, confused head, to Grimy shoes, tired feet. You will see my cashew eyes midway and stop there. But it is just that. You will just stop there. And looking for any fragment of beauty trapped inside, you will give up. And walk farther away. You will not realize that I have given up that beauty for something else. And you will never come close to fully embracing it either. You are dyslexic to anything deprived of glitter. Which explains why
Today, you will not notice me passing you by.
