I'm quite fond of this picture, three of my dearest friends from that great college on Rad Square in the same room at the same time.
I'd like to honour my friends with a diary post that is not just about me me me me me. Because I couldn't be me without them.
Happy Birthday to Princess Naila. She's a cinephile like me and my supplier of high quality Sacha Baron Cohen bootlegs. She's one of the few people who can drag me out of bed on a lazy sunday morning to go watch a film premiere. We used to live together at St. Cross before she moved to Mansfield as warden, eventually becoming junior dean. Since then she's had to deal with undergraduate students running naked in the quad at midnight and some drunk ones who tried to burn down the chapel (there's some crazy shit going on that college). She's somewhere in Algiers right now and hopefully she'll get me some North African garlic that I can use for cooking adobo. I could have spent my summer vacation with the Touareg and the Berbers had it not been for the fact that the Algerian visa application process is tailored after the French system which requires a copy of every imaginable document NOT in one's posession. (However, I intend to cross from the Moroccan border when I get to the Atlas mountains in October. I'm Flipinoy, nobody can do visa-less cross border crossings quite like us.)
Dear Henriette, congratulations to the new arrival, you're not a virgin anymore! Henriette has just given birth to the new addition in the group, a pretty pretty princess named Claudia. Claudia is a name that reeks of Roman nobility. No surprise as Henriette is a classicist. Henriette is (was) my running coach but I will never run with her again because she is just too Florence Griffith Joyner for me. I'm more of a Kenyan runner. For example she'd do a hundred metres cross country in 15 seconds flat WHILE reciting Cicero but I'd cover the same distance in 40 seconds. (When I meant I was Kenyan, it simply means I register Kenyan long distance race times for sprint distances.) Until she came along, I never realised that buying training shoes in Copenhagen involved your feet getting measured by lasers to the last mm (this takes a lot of time especially if you have feet shaped like ginger, parang luya ika nga, they had to lubricate my feet with tons of Lurpak just so it could fit a normal shoe), your gait analysed as you run on a treadmill, and the impact distribution on your soles and knees calculated. And yet, they give you a generic "Made in China" Nike pair anyway. (Although there is a new 'smart' Adidas trainer out now.)
I miss our sunday brunches when we were all living in that place with no kitchen.
Counsel, good luck on the new job! Sarah's the first person I made friends with in college so I'm a bit sad that she's moving to the real world so soon. Sarah was among the phalanx of lawyers ready to defend me after I got stopped in Heathrow and the dogs found some 'narcotic white stuff' in my genuine fake Goyard messenger bag. It turns out that I picked the wrong luggage that really belonged to Nora Aunor. (Oh man, Nora Aunor trying to sneak crystal meth into LAX always brings a tear to my eye. Hindi ko alam yan. Galing sa fans ko iyan! Anytime you are in town Nora just give me a call, I can synthesize white powder for you in my lab. I can even shape the glass pipes with the skill of a Murano blower.)
"I'm leaving" she blurted and I nearly spat out precious PIMMs on the manicured lawn of the deer park on an impossibly beautiful day in Middle Earth. "What about MY human rights?" I moaned after she mentioned that she was joining her government's Human Rights commission. But I am happy for her and hoped this was going to be an assignment in sensual Paris, or sophisticated Geneve, or intoxicating New York, or exciting Nairobi. "Canberra," said she "when you are in Australia you now have a place to stay." "I'm sorry, I'm not hearing you correctly," said I bewildered. "Did you just say Canberra, that city built for stiff bureaucrats? That's like Brasilia! Or that new capital the Burmese junta are building somewhere in the godforsaken jungle!" Sarah assured me this was the right career move towards a stint with the international Red Cross.
I generally avoid lawyers. I think it's the meanest vocation in the word. Yes, 'vocation' because you can actually choose NOT to be a lawyer. Why one would want a one way ticket to hell, I could never really understand. (When they morph into sleazy politicians then that's truly beyond redemption. Take for example Philippine InJustice Secretary Gonzales who is not only a bad lawyer but fits the description of one having 'subterranean intellect') Lawyers make life unnecessarily difficult. Even now some smart alecky lawyer is drafting something called "Rules for Blogging" as if the world needed it. Anyways, lawyers are human too and while they walk this earth they need all the love (at least the good ones) they can get before Belzeebub takes their souls. So far all my lawyer friends are great people and work for very little or no pay in aid and humanitarian agencies so I don't have to go to Quiapo and pray to the saints to assure them a place in purgatory at least.
Sarah's been such an angel to everyone around her and I know she'll do a good job making the world a better place. I'm definitely going to miss those long cafe sessions with her where we'd talk about lots of things.
His Royal Orangeness Karl Willem misses counsel already. We need cuddle therapy.