My Juday

I never thought I would ever do something like it, but thanks (or no thanks) to B, I did. I went in line, in Gateway, just so I could watch a Judy Ann Santos movie.

I know, I know. I sound like one of those insufferably cono kids in UP who says things like "Let's make tusok tusok those fishballs" or "Manong driver, pa-pull over na lang po sa tabi." Ang sarap batukan. However, pretentious though I can also sometimes be, my dislike for Judy Ann's films has nothing to do with putting on airs. Or even with Judy Ann herself. I just can't stand soppy, corny films.

But what could I do? When I signed up for this relationship with B, I knew it meant learning to live with those aspects of his life that didn't exactly ring my bell, like his pig-about-to-be-slaughtered snores or his addiction to beauty pageants. I mean, it has to be tit for tat, doesn't it? He accepts my laziness; I accept his Juday worship.

I do understand why he adores Juday. Like Clara -- or is it Mara? -- he endured a lot as a child. His parents split up when he was still very young. And because his father had no job, his mother went to Italy to work as a nanny, leaving all four children with their grandparents, in a house that was already crawling with bawling, runty cousins, plus a few wicked aunts and uncles thrown in for good measure. You can imagine how that can be a recipe for disaster -- or, at least, a real-life soap opera. With no parents to defend them, they were treated no better then the househelp, the money sent home by their mother used to buy toys and clothes for their cousins.

His Juday worship, in other words, is a form of identification. He sees himself in her. And as silly and melodramatic as her movies are, he finds in them some degree of comfort, as though they symbolize the promise of a much longed-for happy ending. (Even now, when, arguably, he's reached a happy ending of his own --two cars, a managerial position in one of the country's top corporations, and, of course, a dashing prince charming with a big...sword. :))

It doesn't stop with Juday either. He also roots for all the reality TV underdogs you can name. Carrie Underwood (a guileless farm girl before she became a bestselling artist and Grammy winner), Elliot Yamin (the unprepossessing, sickly boy with the golden voice who happens to be deaf in one ear), Heather (the incredibly photogenic America's Next Top Model contestant who suffers from a form of autism), and so on and so forth, a whole slew of men and women who, like his favorite lunchtime soap heroine, found a way to rise above their sad and humble beginnings.

In this, though I'm no fan of Juday, we're the same. After all, I, too, cheer wildly every time I watch my favorite Cuban volleyball player, Taimarys Aguero, spike over veritable giants. For at 5'10, she's nowhere close in the height department to her Russian and Brazilian opponents. The tallest among these, the Russian Ekaterina Gamova, wouldn't even fit inside a telephone booth.

Now that I think about it, it occurs to me that maybe he fell for me because the time we met, three years ago, I was every inch (no pun intended) a wet bird. I don't want to go into details, but the truth is, that first meeting in, uh, Starbucks, I cut one very sorry figure, having been recently dumped by my lover for some straight dude.

Well, maybe that and my irresistible good looks. :) In any case, I have to thank Juday for being a good role model because, all the difficulties he's had to face in life notwithstanding, B turned out to be one incredibly kind, if overdramatic, soul, the sort who buys sampaguita garlands from streetkids even while lecturing them to tell their parents to go get some work. And obviously he's been more than kind to me -- the biggest baby of all. Except for that one time when he nearly hit me with a chair (don't ask why), he has loved me, for more than three years now, despite my constant transformations from prince to warty toad.

I just hope, sometime soon, I'll be Ryan enough for him. For now though, I'll square my shoulders, take a deep breath, and brace myself for the next Judy Ann film. If this isn't love, baby I don't know what is.

The No-face Man

The time we saw the No-Face Man
in an episode of Ripley’s,
our hearts wanted to scream No.
This was too much, too horrible.
Not at all like the two-legged dog
prancing on the lawn towards its master,
still happy for all its strangeness,
or the tiger man covered in tattoos
from his eyelids down to his penis.
The No-Face Man lacked bone, lips.
On his face, just a dark
hairy bowl of emptiness
you’d mistake for eviscerated
coconut shell, the meat
all gone, only the husk
left for what? For a corner in a
museum? That night we lay in bed
holding on to each other, silent but
thinking of the No-Face Man together.
Could he still eat? How did he breathe?
If he had no mouth, where did his
wife kiss him? Was it true you could put a fist
in the hole in his face? And, of course,
hovering above us both: Why
did he choose to live?
That’s the part we couldn’t quite believe.
For if bread mold ate our faces
like it did his, no doubt
we would readily choose death,
forget that each of us had the other
than live knowing we had no eyes,
no nose to smell or sneeze with,
no tongue to register bitterness or sweetness,
like those clusters of Guess-Who puzzles
in celebrity magazines,
head figures with question marks on their faces
waiting to be filled.
Die than live looking like a monster,
for, if truth be told, he looked like a monster,
though we didn’t want to call him that,
though we preferred to think of him
as an unfinished drawing,
already imagining
ourselves in his place.
The next day we didn’t eat bread,
fearing disease.
But I bought you a shirt for no clear reason,
and you got me the book I’d always wanted,
each one buying love for that human wonder,
the No-Face Man
who already haunted our lives and grinned
his non-existent grin in our mirrors.

Bicycle

I was eight when you came home one August
and told me to look inside your car’s trunk:
a bicycle was there,
a shimmering, splendid BMX for which you’d
shelled out five hundred bucks.
Not bad for a middlebrow, suburban lawyer, eh?
You said, and I knew for the first time
how truly you loved me.

Not bad, I said, and mounted it at once
to pedal past your big hands.
The first few forward moves were shaky but
I finally managed a trajectory
controlled by me alone
powered by my hands and legs
along my own chosen road.

You never let on if you had been afraid for me,
and right there and then
I realized our secret deal
that was to go on long after I had outgrown this bike:
that it was my duty to be brave for you,
and it was yours to never ask me if I was scared.

At eighteen I am having troubles
enough to scare
a battalion of men:
cars, credit cards, concert tickets,
coming out.
Sometimes I get so scared I think of
pushing a bullet through my brain,
a Smith & Wesson at my temple, a swift,
categorical pain. Nothing to it
but blood to be mopped the next day.

But everytime I see you, I’m reminded
of the deal we have made, of the bike
and the secret words: Be brave.

You have earned your keep so far and stayed
silent. You never asked me if I was scared.

How I wish you could read me well and see
beneath the brave young boy
who knew his spin turns and speed,
there is a shivering child
aching to give up his balance,
aching to be asked, Are you scared?
Would you like to tilt and fall down now?
And I would nod,
and cry,
fall,
trusting you would catch me, hug me,
and tell me that same joke about
the middlebrow, suburban lawyer
not being bad.

Walls

Thank God we don’t live in a house like that,
you say as we drive past the squatters.
Imagine what we have to do just to make love,

there being no room, no walls
dividing people. And hearing you,
I picture us poor, horny, pressed together

by a baby and perhaps a sick father,
our house nothing but a small cube
with very little room for lust or affection.

Perhaps it is night and the two of us
itch to get going under the blanket, you lifting
my skirt, me feeling in the dark for your belt.

Perhaps it is night and we can do it
on the floor, careful not to set the house on fire
as if we were two sticks rubbing together.

We can probably hide behind a hanging blanket,
you will probably drink the sound of my voice
with your kisses. Like prey, we have

to learn to be invisible, blending in
with the color of cabinets and boxes,
hoping the baby will not cry as we go at it,

hoping your father will go on
coughing his way across dreams.
This is probably how we will make love

in a house like that – pretending the world
has closed its eyes on us
as we open ourselves to each other.

Yes, thank God, our house has space enough
to get lost in. Why, even birds will drop
flying the gaping distance between our rooms.

Me, Picasso?

My first love was drawing.

When I was about nine or ten years old, I'd often lie on my stomach on the floor of our living room, a pencil in hand, and draw people. Mostly, it's women with big dark eyes and long hair, the kind you'd see in a Japanese animated movie.

I think I was pretty good, too. I won a couple of prizes both in grade school and high school, and whenever my classmates needed someone to make them a "love painting" (basically a 12 x 8 cardboard on which has been written, in ornate letters and beside a drawing of a love-struck couple, the lyrics of their favorite song), I was one of the two guys they approached. It seems unbelievably cheesy now, but back then it made for some really good business.

Recognizing that I had a gift, my parents got me an art tutor, a Filipino-Chinese painter named George Ng, who came to our house every Saturday and taught me all about foregrounding, balance, perspective. My dad even had a small studio built for me just beside the labahan. Its walls were made of colorful corrugated iron, making it look like a candy store, and it had waist-to-ceiling windows on all sides, so neighbors could peer in and admire my paintings.

I enjoyed the classes -- though honestly I would've enjoyed them more if they hadn't coincided with my favorite TV show that time, Roller Superstars, where two competing teams of rollerskaters raced and knocked each other out of a big circular skating rink. What I liked best about these art classes was looking at Mr. Ng's art books, which contained pictures of centuries' worth of masterpieces. I remember poring over the works of Rembrandt, Degas, Vermeer and -- Mr. Ng's favorite -- Velasquez, and wondering how I could achieve that intense shade of yellow, that subtle watery blue.

I was learning quite a lot, too. In just a couple of weeks, I'd managed to graduate from color pastels to oil, and before long I'd produced my first oil masterpiece, good enough to be framed: a very lifelike portrait of Matet de Leon, copied from some showbiz magazine. This was hung at the center of my studio, on the wall right across from the door, so everyone walking by could see how accurately I was able to capture the star of Halimaw Sa Banga.

Happy and proud though my parents were, they were bothered by one thing -- that I kept on drawing all these beautiful women. And not just ordinary beautiful women either, but women in the most exquisite evening gowns, each one with a sash saying Ms. USA or Ms. Japan. "P__," I can imagine my dad saying, "Mukhang magiging fashion designer, di painter, and anak mo ah."

And I think, without anything being said about it, that I understood that my parents were alarmed. For after a while I started hiding these drawings, as though in making them I was commiting a sin.

To my parents' credit, they didn't scold or confront me about it -- we're just not that kind of family. Instead, they tried "positive reinforcement." Seeing that I was getting to be really good at drawing female figures, my dad encouraged me to paint the almost-naked women on his beer calendars. These women weren't half as interesting as the ones in the billowing, sparkling evening gowns of my other works, but, being a compliant boy, I went and copied them, and soon I had a bunch of open-mouthed, bare-breasted women staring longingly from their wooden frames in my studio, much to the delight of the greasy talyer boys in the auto shop next to our house.

The art classes lasted only a year, eventually superseded by tae kwon do and swimming, in both of which I hopelessly floundered. But I kept on drawing and joining art competitions. The highlight of this episode of my life was winning first place in a district-level on-the-spot poster-making competition, judged by a local celebrity painter named Inday Cadapan. The theme was family solidarity and I drew a father, a mother and a son in such a way that they formed a subtle triangle on the cartolina. Triangles were supposed to symbolize solidity -- I learned that from Mr. Ng.

But I stopped painting and drawing eventually, because of an instance that looks like a bad, random scene in an otherwise logical plot.

One day, when I was about fifteen, my nanay examined the framed works hanging in my studio and said, out of nowhere, that I had no real talent and should concentrate on other things instead. She added that I couldn't even make a single decent painting without Mr. Ng's help.

I was shocked, and angry. But instead of trying to prove her wrong -- and this, I think reveals my character -- I just gave up on painting altogether. I put away my staedler and brushes and didn't touch them again.

Looking back on that day now, searching for reasons why my mom said what she said, it occurs to me that it wasn't -- couldn't have been -- the senseless cruelty that I imagined it that time. Without her explaining things to me, I have come to understand and accept that she didn't want me to be a starving artist -- which to her was what I was bound to become -- but a lawyer like my dad. And to protect me from my own surely destructive passion, she had to break my heart.

Or maybe, just maybe, she'd found -- the same way she'd find out my other secrets later on -- my hidden stash of women in their irreproachable, shining gowns. And she must have known that to save me, she'd have to look bad in my eyes.

Davao

Tito Monster

A month ago, I attended a seminar called 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and one of the things I had to do there was make a list of the most important roles I play in life. Naturally, I put in English Specialist (my job title at the call center), athlete (my aspiration), son, brother and lover.

But there was one other role which, surprisingly, I found myself writing down: uncle.

Unlike my lover, I have never really been into kids, especially the pesky sort, and can stand them only in small doses. In fact, silly as it may sound, I often quarrel with the three-year-old kid who lives next door to us, a good-looking, adorable boy named Jacko who unfortunately likes hanging out in our apartment and climbing all over the furniture, in the process reducing the number of drinking glasses in our house (which came in a set of six) to three. When such quarrels erupt, my lover, who spoils him like a son, often finds himself caught in the middle, unwilling referee in a potentially apocalyptic battle between Zaido Blue and the Ultimate Warrior.

I guess I'm just not the kind of person who finds poetry in baby talk and bliss in the smell of pee. I have nothing but respect for those pre-school teachers who have this uncanny ability to herd young kids around like sheep and recite ABC a hundred times in ten minutes, but God forbid that the time should come when I should find myself in their shoes.

A friend of mine once told me that this allergic reaction to kids may have something to do with my own unhappy childhood. For the truth is, as a child, I didn't have many friends, was often teased and bullied, and was always treated unfairly, even by adults. One memory that sticks is the time one of my aunts on my mother's side of the family came home from the states with her husband, and our family joined our relatives in Taytay to get our pasalubong. All my cousins were there and we formed a circle around our tita who stood beside a sack full of toys and chocolates. I was eight or nine years old. I'd requested a viewmaster, nothing fancy, and I felt a delicious thrill just thinking of all those pictures -- the Golden Gate Bridge, Niagara Falls -- that I'd get to see with just one click. However, as the sack started to empty and one by one my cousins got their giant cars and laser guns, I realized, with a sudden sureness, that I wasn't going to get my viewmaster after all. And true enough, when my tita finished reading the list of nephews and nieces to be given toys, my name and my name alone wasn't called.

What I felt that time -- I remember it clearly -- wasn't sadness but embarrassment and panic that someone would notice I got nothing at all. I wanted to disappear so I could avoid my cousins' pitying stare, my mother's worried look. But, of course, someone said: "Oy, what about Puroy?" And my tita just laughed and said, "Oh I'm sorry, we forgot it."

Without doubt there are other people (my baby is a perfect example, his being a classic Judy Ann Santos childhood) who suffered more than I did as a kid but who ended up adoring kids all the more, perhaps because they knew what it was like to have their hearts broken at such a young age. But my experiences as a kid made me want to grow up too fast, made me cope by trying to skip childhood altogether. And this -- though it sounds like such a lame excuse -- is probably why I can't stand kids now.

Overwhelmingly out of character and against my nature then is this -- what else to call it? -- incredible affection I feel for my nephew and my niece. Call it familial bond, but for them I sometimes find myself doing things I wouldn't normally do, or I would do but only grudgingly. Like Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets, I have discovered in myself, through them, a certain measure of kindness, generosity and patience I never thought I was capable of.

No, I haven't bought my nephew a PS4 yet or chipped in for my niece's tuition fee (roughly equivalent to my two-months' salary), but it is with a genuine smile that I occasionally take out my wallet and buy my niece a piece of chocolate when she asks me to. And every time I visit Booksale, I rummage through the children's books section to see if there's anything about dragons and aliens for my boy genius of a nephew. I don't mean to make it sound as though I should get a Best Uncle Award for such paltry gifts, but coming from a Scrooge like me, hey, they represent an unexpected, altruistic gesture.

Funny thing is, I didn't always feel this way about them. I mean I've always loved them -- especially my nephew, Galo, whom I was able to babysit when he was just a year old -- but I didn't feel very, well, attached to them. They were just these funny little creatures with big heads who had some really charming antics (Uyen thinks of herself as a boy and does push-ups to prove she's one), and while I enjoyed watching them make fools of themselves once in a while, I really preferred reading a book than listening to them sing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" or chatting with them about Dragonball.

I don't know exactly when my paradigm shifted. But when Galo was hospitalized because of dengue, my heart broke every time he cried and begged the doctor not to give him an injection anymore. And that's when it dawned on me: I loved this chubby, smart-alecky boy like nothing else in the world. Nothing else, except maybe his little sister.

I'm grateful to these two kids for teaching me how to be a kid again, to reclaim that part of my life that I renounced out of bitterness and anger. This is not to say I have now turned into Brooke White, the coolest, singing nanny in the whole wide world. But just the other day, I played Touch the Color and Find the Shape with Jacko and Uyen for two hours in my apartment, and though I can't say I had a blast, I sat there with them and let them run around and clamber all over me and the furniture.

The House Eater

First the radio disappeared
from our house, a blank space
taking its place on the shelf where it once
chattered and sang all day. After that,
it was the rice cooker, then the washing
machine, the VHS player, until one day
I was watching a flower vase instead
of a television. I thought there was a thief
or a gang of dwarves stealing our things,
but mother told me it was father’s sickness,
his addiction that was taking things away.
At that time I didn’t know what addiction
meant, I thought it was some unstoppable
and consuming hunger. And I imagined
my father crouched over our things and
eating them, disemboweling the TV,
filling his mouth with bolts and wires,
Like the strange man I’d seen on Ripley’s,
a man who ate bicycles and airplanes.
Oh I didn’t doubt my father was sick.
he’d grown so thin it seemed he too
might vanish, though he still sat me
on his lap and told me stories, though
there were still traces of the kind giant
who’d taught me how to play ball. My mother
wept all the time and screamed at him
to get the hell out, but I loved
my father so much I wanted to feed him
my own bed, to offer everything I owned
on one large plate. If that wasn’t enough,
I was willing to give him the living
room and kitchen, the bathroom with its
delicious faucets and sink, the study
with its rows and rows of books as dessert.
He could eat the whole house if that
was what it would take for him to get better.
Never mind if we ended up sleeping
on the street, never mind if the dark sky
were to be our only ceiling. Whenever
I think back to the house of my childhood,
I see my father with his open mouth
and me spooning my life in.

Greener Pastures

Recently, I bumped into Abe, a friend from way back who is now based in Singapore. He's working for San Rio as, I think, a licensing director, and apparently making I don't know how many times what I'm making now as a call center trainer. And he has the watch, the laptop, and the 100,000-peso nose too, to prove that he has indeed "made it" abroad.

I can't say I'm not a little envious -- okay, a lot envious. Ten years ago, when I was still an active member of the Antipolo Midnight Society, which Abe, a few other friends and I founded for no reason other than to have an excuse to drink the nights away together, I was among those who were doing rather well financially. I mean, I wasn't rich but I had a car, I lived comfortably, and I owned shares in my dad's small, er, hospitality business. True, a lot of what I had came from my dad -- I couldn't have very well afforded to buy a car myself, not on my university researcher's salary -- but I didn't actually sponge off my old man; I rarely asked him for anything.

Now though, it's obvious that my friends have left me so far behind that I can't even eat their dust anymore. And largely it's my fault (though the government is to blame as well), having chosen the life of a starving teacher and artist. While many of my friends upped and left the country to work in places like Korea, Singapore, Dubai and the US, I opted to become a teacher instead. Which isn't exactly a decision I regret. For the first few years, I did enjoy teaching in UP, despite getting a measly 13,000 pesos a month (and it stayed that way for seven years!). I loved being able to conduct classes in the lagoon, surrounded by trees and a bunch of eager, upturned faces. I loved having to work only 3 hours a day for only 4 days a week. And, of course, I loved the feeling of being stuck in a time capsule, which is what teaching in a university felt like for me. It's as though I never got out of college, never aged a day beyond eighteen, and I could spend my life shuttling back and forth in my yellow Toyota between my small cubicle in the department and my favorite table at the CAL library.

And even when, eventually, I decided to leave UP to work in a call center, it wasn't money that drove me to do so but something else. I just tell people it's the money that made me do it because it's the easiest reason to understand.

Don't get me wrong. I dream about becoming a millionaire everyday. Daily my mind cranks out images of me in a black BMW, a hot dude in tow, and ordering one of my minions to put me and my ten closest friends on the first flight to Saint Croix, business class of course. But truth to tell, if I do become a millionaire, the first thing I would probably do is have a volleyball court built in our backyard, so my friends and I could play any time we wished to. Then I'll get that BMW and the hot dude.

Thinking about all of this now, I am inclined to believe that it is my unambitious, unadventurous nature that has made me stay where I am all these years -- same house, same country, and, despite my shift from the academe to call center, same line of work. For even as a UP teacher, I could have gone places, like my mentor and friend Neil Garcia who, after earning his Ph.D., found himself the recipient of so many international grants which not only took him to the US and the Netherlands, among other countries, but also left him with more dollars than the average Filipino will see in his lifetime.

But though I listened with awe to his sun-dazzled descriptions of Cambridge and UCLA, I didn't really feel the urge to join the qeue in front of the US embassy and beg for a visa. My thought was: if I went there, I'd end up missing playing volleyball in Ateneo too much.

But what do I know? Right now, I am happy enough to be able to eat in Jolibee and shop in Bench anytime I want to, but if by some stroke of luck I manage to wangle a ticket to Connecticut or L.A. or New York, I might, like many of my expat friends, never even want to return to the Philippines after my first snow, not even if I don't get a high-profile job that can pay for a new nose.

Earthquake Chasing

Poised between hope and fear
Of what might come, we keep
An eye on the animals, goats

Grazing on a green slope,
Birds wheeling overhead. They say
Animals sense earthquakes days

Before they happen, their bodies
Like instruments detecting
The subtlest of vibrations,

Telling them to flee before the disaster.
I sit beside you in our tent, neither
Husband nor wife, waiting

For a different set of signs, sure
The rocks will tumble out of what
We’ve built for years in secret,

Sure it will happen soon but still
Choosing to be in the epicenter.
Forgive me for almost hoping

For the definitive tremor. But in your eyes
I’ve glimpsed wings flapping,
Dogs running away. I know

But need to see that I can’t stop
What’s meant to happen.

Bahay Kubo

For more than ten years I lived in my bahay kubo, a one-bedroom affair that my dad had originally built for himself and my mom. It stood -- stands, actually, for it is still there though I don't live in it anymore -- in one corner of our family compound, about a hundred yards from our main house and separated from it by a low, white gate with flaking paint. It had its own kitchen and bathroom, plus a veranda that often doubled as a guest room whenever my friends were in town.

I think my dad decided to give the kubo to me, some twelve years ago, when I started bringing "friends" home. It was his silent way of saying, "Okay, son, I know what you're up to and I understand. Just don't do it in our house" -- meaning, of course, our main house. In short, that decision was the equivalent of turning a blind eye.

Whatever my dad's original vision of the kubo was -- and if I know my dad, it would be completely rustic -- I changed it as soon as the key was handed to me. Some of the changes were banal enough: I added a small library, tacked movie posters on the wall, typical college-boy stuff. But some of the other changes, I'm sure, made my parents stay clear of the kubo even as they started wondering what ritual sacrifices were being done there. I replaced the white light bulbs with red ones; I hung black curtains on the window; to top it all -- and here I've got to give my mom credit for not even tittering -- I installed a rectangular, two-meter long mirror over the bed.

In the ten years that I stayed there, with various lovers, I was able to live a life that would make Arthur Rimbaud green with envy. Well, maybe not Rimbaud -- he lived a pretty bad-assed life himself -- but certainly many of my UP friends who thought it was darned cool how I lived in a house of such ill-repute, and in the suburbs at that. Suffice it to say that our maid had grown accustomed to finding used rubbers in the trashcan. In fact, I think she would have been disappointed to find none after a gin-soaked night.

But it wasn't just the sex and the freedom that made the kubo special. It was also where I spent some of the most wonderful, as well as most heart-wrenching, moments of my life with both friends and lovers. There I played strip 7-up with the gang, much to the delight of my best friend Melvin, who got the chance to see his long-time crush dance ocho-ocho buck naked. There I discovered a rice sparrow caught in my mosquito net one bright morning -- Lord knows how it got there -- and flying like a tiny angel over my right foot. There I was able to write in a sort of trance my first real poem entitled Bicycle. And there too, sadly, I drank beer on the roof with a lover who after three years had fallen in love with someone else. Many times, I went to bed in my kubo wanting to die. But just as many times, I woke up and for some inexplicable reason just couldn't help but smile.

That kubo was a witness. A witness and a gift. And if my parents don't give me anything else (but generous them they have already given me so much more), I wouldn't be able to say that they didn't love me.

Size: Small

I am short. I didn't always think so. Back in grade school, I was one of the tallest guys in class, one of those kids who stood in the back in class photos. But when my classmates and I hit puberty, most of the other boys started outgrowing their pants while I, along with a handful of not-so-lucky kids, remained two sizes too small for my first-year-high-school pants, my legs seemingly unwilling to make the transition from boy to man.

There are some advantages to being short, mind you. Even at fourteen, I could easily squeeze into that dark, cramped space between the cabinet and study table during a game of hide-and-seek and squat there for a quarter of an hour without losing the feeling in my legs. Of course, by that time, it wasn't other kids but my mom I was hiding from, and if you were ever fourteen, you'd know why and what I was hiding. Also, being short helped ease the pressure of having to be stronger or faster or more masculine off me a bit. I was like a poodle; people expect a bull terrier to be fierce, but a poodle only needs to be cute.

Despite these advantages, I do wish I were tall. Part of the reason for this is that I'm just so sick of people giving me one look and thinking, okay, he's no threat at all. I want to be a threat. I want people to see me and feel a quiver of fear and envy go down their spine. I want to look like someone who just strayed off the set of 300 and makes everyone else look like a pansy. Spartans, what's your profession? Haah!

This longing to be a threat, to be over rather than underestimated, crystallized in me when I started playing volleyball in high school. Being short, I was always benched. And in those rare moments when I got some playing time, the tosser never sent the ball my way, which made me the athletic equivalent of a wallflower. That's not something you want to happen especially if the girl you're courting (that time it was an exquisite and, yes, taller, girl named Hershey) is watching.

I have learned to live with being short however. Or rather, I've learned to work with what I have. I avoid wearing shirts with horizontal stripes, for example, and go to the gym every now and then to make sure my legs are strong if stubby. And as a volleyball player, I have managed to focus on and develop certain skills that don't require mile-long calves, like setting and digging, and assured myself an integral spot on my team. Of course, treating the team out every once in a while helps as well.

I know I'll never be a runway model. I know unless the FIVB lowers the height of the net, I'll never make it to the Olympics (but then, neither would any six-foot tall Filipino). But when I'm all warmed up and adrenaline-pumped, I do manage to hit over much taller blockers, and if I time my jump just right, I can sometimes even roof giant spikers. On those sweet if rare occasions, I just turn away from the net, raise my fist in the air, and grunt "haah!"

If that's not enough, I just quote Carlos Romulo who said, with what I imagine to be a sly grin, that "big things come in small packages." That from a man who delivered a speech at the United Nations standing on two telephone books.