It's Beginning to unbuckle again

1/9/07 Like most days, I stay at home with my mom and watch television. Periodically she'll wake up from her half-sleep and tell me to turn off the television--it's been on all day and there's nothing to watch. I wonder now if at the time I realized how much it was like regressing to being at home on vacation from year-round school, spending all day watching tv, or home for the summer from college, spending all day aimlessly with my parents, the comfort and the lethargy.

in the morning I watch news coverage of the 400th anniversary of the Feast of the Black Nazarene. In the Quiapo district of metro Manila today, there will be a huge procession, a replica of the black nazarene on top of a platform hoisted on the shoulders of maybe fifty men, all the streets along the procession crowded with devotees, pilgrims some from the states walking along barefoot in the streets, young men, impassioned and foolish in their youth trying to surf the crowds to get on top of the platform to cop a feel of the replica of the black nazarene--this simple act would enoble and charm the remainder of their ordinary lives.

I think to myself, how special, what serendipity, that I'm here in the Philippines on the 400th anniversary of the feast of the black nazarene, albeit 500 miles north of the action. I feel special for being here. Is this me trying to console myself because I don't want to be here?

They have changed the parade route anticipating even larger crowds. In previous years people have been trampled to death. I wished I was there, but then again not really, manila traffic is already a mess so I can't imagine what it's like today--hallowed ground where jeepneys fear to tread.

My dad left the house early in the morning for who knows where after a brief but dramatic scuffle with my mom--a routine argument probably over my dad's philandering, escalating to shoving and slapping and the help yelling for them to stop, aren't you ashamed, they scold my dad after he lamely boxes my mom with his fat hands and flabby arms, acting like this in front of your son, my mom just laughs sardonicaly and tells my dad to leave and not come back, maybe she also tells him she hopes he gets in a car accident and dies.

Later that afternoon on the local cable station they inexplicably air the first movie of the Russian vampire trilogy Nightwatch and I am excited because I remember reading an article about this very movie.

The next morning my mother, my father and I eat breakfast and happily watch Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina as if nothing out of the ordinary happened the previous morning.