Moving On

Hi!

I've moved and found blogging heaven in Wordpress.

To access my blog, just go to http://thefilipinamistress.wordpress.com or just click here.

Hope to see you there =)

Mistress of the Television: Chuck

I think I watch too much TV.

Recently, I have just finished watching the entire Season 1 of Chuck. This is basically about a computer geek who works in a low-paying appliance shop as a one of the Nerd Herd computer repair man. Due to a former college roommate-slash-nemesis sending him an e-mail of government secrets encoded in images which became engraved in his brain, a really hot CIA Agent Sarah and an NSA officer John are assigned to guard him at all costs as it is a matter of national security that Chuck be kept safe at all times. Considering that he is a geek after all, basically Chuck spends majority of his time fumbling through several life-threatening incidents, from which the two fully-armed agents would always manage to save him.

Chuck prefers to keep his double identity a secret from his family and friends and several episodes show of him doing his best to save his friends and his sister's life without their knowledge. If the storyline does not get to you, the love story - but, of course! - that ensues between Chuck and Sarah will make you want to look forward to the next episode, just to see how much more Sarah can keep herself from falling for our dorky protagonist.

A huge lesson here, by the way, is that hot gorgeous women will always fall for the smart dorky geeks. It's in our genes. We can't help it. They're sweet and sensitive. And the Alpha Male wonders why women loved watching Beauty and the Geek? Come on! Women dig geeks. Everybody knows brains will always conquer over brawn anytime. Everybody ages and eventually, a person will lose all that brawn. And what will you end up with?

Nothing.

I rest my case.

The Language Barrier

Darna, a classmate of mine from medical school who was currently in a long-term relationship with her boyfriend after EngineerBoy, was just like the rest of the classmates in my batch who were in committed relationships. She found it her responsibility to set up the single girls in the class with her equally single male friends. Hence, Mr.Bisaya.

Mr.Bisaya was her boyfriend’s ex-landlord. He came from a rich family who originally hailed from Cebu. Because of his work, he moved to the provinces and was currently living at some boarding house with some friends. Darna gave my number to him and we started texting. Because he was of a different cellular network, I didn’t reply as much as I would have wanted to... Yes, I can be such a cheapskate sometimes. Well, it wasn’t as if he knocked my socks off with his text messages anyway.

Because I was bored and curious about him, I plotted on how I can find the opportunity to finally meet him. I was going home soon for a short weekend vacation from the community. Mr.Bisaya lived somewhere between the community and home. I told him I would be stopping by his area since I needed to catch another bus and that we should meet. He agreed.

I met up with him at a local fastfood joint. He was short, well-built (from all the tennis playing, I suppose) and average-looking. He was nice, yes, but he didn’t knock my socks off.

There was a major language barrier considering that he speaks in Cebuano (which is something like a deeper version of the local Bisaya) and although most Cebuanos can carry a good conversation with the local Bisayans and vice versa, I, on the other hand, can’t understand nor speak Cebuano. Although I do understand a little of the local Bisaya, that is, if you don’t talk too fast enough for me, I can barely speak the language. My Bisaya-speaking abilities is basically limited to the following medically-related phrases:

“Unsa imong gibati karon?” (How do you feel today?)
“Ginhawa lalum.” (Breathe deeply.)
“Kini imong tambal, imuhang ilumnon tulu ka beses sa usa ka adlaw, usa ka semana.”
(This is your medicine. You drink it three times a day for one week.)

And I am not even going to start ranting about my Tausug. It’s just sooo darn embarrassing enough - for someone who lived majority of her life around Muslims - that I can’t even make one coherent sentence in Tausug.

So, Mr.Bisaya and I ended up sign-languaging. LOL. Kidding… Actually, he spoke in Bisaya while I spoke in Tagalog interspersped with occasional Bisayan terms, in the hopes that we can both understand each other. I finally realized that it’s incredibly difficult to be your true self with someone who doesn’t speak the same language as you do. You find yourself unable to crack jokes and show him your great sense of humor, which is basically what I usually do during first dates... Yes, I don’t take life too seriously. So sue me… You find yourself drastically thinking and rethinking the things that come out of your mouth. My cerebral faculties goes on hyperspeed as it tries to catch up with the Tagalog-English conversations in my head, translating as much of it into Bisaya, and then leaving everything in God’s will as I let my lips and tongue enunciate the words as correctly as I can, hopefully without butchering the dialect.

It was no surprise that I ended up with a major headache.

I must have been a sadist in my past life because apparently I loved torturing myself and he was able to angle a second date from me after that. I spent one very wholesome night with him the next time. On my way to the community, I stopped by his area after a short weekend vacation at home and we had dinner, drinks and listened to some local acoustic one-man band show which he loved and I didn’t but didn’t tell him (The band was singing my grandfather’s favorite songs, for God’s sake!). We ended up checking in at a room at some hotel and sleeping on separate beds. There was certainly no canoodling in the middle of the night and neither did I give him any impression that I wanted him to sneak into bed with me.

I don’t really know if he wanted me to though and frankly, I didn’t care.

As much as I would have loved to torture myself with migraine brought about by English-Bisayan translations, I didn’t think that it was going to work. We ended up on another date, this time with Darna, her boyfriend and some of Mr.Bisaya’s friends. Maybe he was becoming more comfortable with me because all their teasing finally brought out his caring and occasionally flirty side, but at that point, I really just wasn’t feeling it. We started communicating less and less until a year or so later I found out he got some girl pregnant and ended up marrying her.


I was okay with it. He wasn’t worth all those headaches anyway. Seriously.

The Man Who Broke Me

Everybody has that certain someone in the past who turned their life upside down. That special someone who took your ideals and revolved them to a complete 360. The one who broke your heart and changed your life forever.

I once had that someone and his name was DevilIncarnate.

Okay, kidding.

I call him Rockstar.

Rockstar was 23 years old, a year older than I was when we first met. He wasn’t that tall but he was well-built, a very talented guitar player who was the youngest in his family. We met at a rehabilitation center where we both volunteering. He wasn’t flirty at first, probably because I still had a boyfriend, albeit long-distance, when we first met. But when I announced that I had finally broken up with that boyfriend, Rockstar usurped on the first good opportunity that he saw. I needed help purchasing a certain DVD for my friend’s bachelorette party and he offered to accompany me. So he picked me up at home and together, we flogged down our embarassment (okay, we were trying to get some porn for the party) and was able to get ourselves some Class A hard-core porn through some local travelling salesmen who sell pirated DVDs. We started texting each other after that, talking more on the phone and before the month ended, he and I were a couple.

It was really fun at first. Despite him being wise in the ways of casual dating, I was his first serious girlfriend so I trained him on the ways of a true boyfriend-girlfriend relationship – the holding hands, the proper positioning of the body when sitting together, the naughty play of words, the expected and unexpected kisses. He was a quick study and soon he was showing me romantic places to dine in, inviting me to lunch with his family, showering me with flowers just because, hanging out at his house after my class, bringing me food at every opportunity. He loved me and never tired of telling me that he was incredibly lucky to have me. He made feel so adored with such fervor that at times I felt that he was choking me with his affection. I found myself wanting to break free, unable to cope up with his expectations, disappointing him so many times for simply being who I am until I started to lose sight of who I am and became forcibly molded into who he thinks I should be.

And oh, how I rebelled.

I started telling male friends I just recently met that was single. I started sneaking out to meet my friends from school without telling him. I started to learn how to drink, to smoke again, to do the things I knew I wanted to experience while was still in my youth. Almost everything he had forbidden me to do, I did. He hated my friends so I snuck out to meet with them. He was jealous of my male bestfriends from highschool and forbid me to stay in touch with them, so I continued texting with them behind his back. But at the end of the day, after a thousand angry text messages and fights over the phone, I feel overcome by guilt and remember that he loved me so much. So I ended up with my tail between my legs, confessing everything to him and vowing never to do it again.

Until the next opportunity came and I once again succumb to it.

If I might have come across as a bad girlfriend, you’re wrong. I swear that I wasn’t. I really did my best to be the person he wanted me to be, to the point that I no longer had any close friends to talk to except for him. I was pulling myself away from my bestfriends and my family and I was so miserable that I tried to drown that mysery with the next closest thing: food. I gained so much weight that I eventually lost my self-confidence, started believing that he is the only person who will ever love me now, began missing a lot of the things that were happening around me, yearning for the opportunity to be who I really am, became desperate for more attention and spiraled more into depression.

And we fought a lot.

Oh, God, how we fought. It wasn’t that it was anybody’s fault really. It was just that Rockstar and I were very different people and I think we had somehow fallen into a relationship before we even got the chance to really know if we even like each other. I was at an age where I was starting to realize that I missed a lot of things in my youth and am now just starting to catch up to them. I wanted to go out, meet people, drink and be noticed. I was driven by an ambition to succeed in life, to not settle if I know that I can still get more and I wanted to make my mark in society. He, on the other hand, was content to stay at home, did not care going out with his friends (the few ones, he had), lounging comfortably at home or working part-time as a business entrepreneur today, a computer encoder tomorrow, a law student one time, a guitarist in a rock band, the next. He was stubborn, opinionated, egotistical and he wanted his woman to spend her days in the kitchen, serving him his meals, catering to his every whim, voiceless, submissive and docile.

I tried to be that woman, but I failed miserably.

He must have been miserable too because he cheated, not once, not twice, but thrice if my memory was right. Our first month together, he slept with a hooker. I forgave him, thinking, I can’t really blame him since he wasn’t getting any from me then. A few months later, he started courting some girl who worked in the same hospital that we were both volunteering in. The girl turned him down so that didn’t progress the way he would have wanted to. His frequent excuse was that I made him so mad because of the things that I did despite him forbidding me that it forces him to cheat with other women just to get back at me. He made me feel like it was my fault, so once again, I forgave him. I can’t remember the rest of the girls he cheated with, except for one, which I will talk about much later in this post.

Somehow, despite all the arguments, we made the relationship work because we knew we loved each other. Almost two years into the relationship, he bought me a 4-carat diamond engagement ring and proposed to me. I was in my 2nd year of medical school, certainly not ready to get married, unsure if I even wanted him to be the man I spend the rest of my life with, but I loved him, I didn’t want to disappoint him and I was afraid that maybe this was as good as it gets. So, I said yes and we started planning for a summer wedding. While his family started checking out churches and wedding venues, we plotted out how we were going to tell my parents.

In my heart, I knew my parents will never agree to my marrying at such an early age, especially when I wasn’t even halfway to finishing medical school. I knew them well enough to know that there is no chance in hell that they will actually say yes. In my heart, I secretly hoped that they wouldn’t agree to it. It was my way out of the engagement. I was a coward, yes, but I needed them to tell him so I didn’t have to be the one who will hurt his feelings.

My parents certainly did not disappoint.

The summer wedding was cancelled. And I was free. For the meantime.

We continued the relationship but it just wasn’t the same anymore. We were still boyfriend and girlfriend, still engaged, but a bitterness was slowly building up in Rockstar. He tried applying for a job at my mother’s office and was turned down. He assumed right away that my mother hated him and bore a grudge against my parents. I left town for quite some time because of school and when I returned, the magic just wasn’t there anymore. After 2 ½ years, we broke up, amicably at first and even when I didn’t think it was a good idea, we continued seeing each other as friends for at least two weeks. He would still text me constantly, even when I chose not to reply, and he would still come around to visit me, hinting at times that he wanted to get back together.

Until he told me about the younger girl he had been seeing, a minor, whom he had been sleeping with behind my back for the past two months.

It was the last straw that finally broke me.

The thing is, if you betray me as a boyfriend, I can understand that, because I might have pushed you to do so being the not so perfect girlfriend. But if you betray me as a friend, then I can’t forgive you. The past two weeks after we broke up, he continued flirting with me, messing my mind up that I didn’t even give myself the chance to mourn for the 2 ½ years that we have been together and had now lost. He made me believe that there was still a chance that we might get back together soon. I agreed to be friends with him even if I didn’t really think it was healthy for both of us. I never asked him for anything except for the promise that we would tell each other once we started seeing other people, so that the other person can move on.

He betrayed that trust, in so many ways imaginable, and I hated him so much.

I barraged him with e-mails of hate and desperation. I even barraged the other girl’s Friendster with scornful messages. Rockstar always brought out the worst in me, and he was still doing it, even after we had broken up. He begins threatening me that he’ll sue me for the hateful e-mails. I didn’t care. I wanted them to feel as miserable as I did. I didn’t want to be the only one feeling the pain.

I wanted to bring them down with me.

It took me two weeks before I stopped crying in my bedroom and burying my sobs among the pillows. It took several months before I could say that I was finally okay. Longer still for me to want to go into another serious relationship again. Rockstar and I never crossed paths again, at least, not face to face, although there were times when I saw him around town. He has a 3-year-old child now with the same girl, but they never married and he was still jobless apparently.

When it comes to my views regarding love, I was never the same person after that. I had become jaded, a little hardened, wiser (if I say so myself) but so much stronger.

I don’t regret ever having met him. I would like to think, if not him, I was bound to meet someone like him in my life anyway. I do hope that he had forgiven me, for I have long forgiven him. For now, I simply choke it all up to experience, just a part of what made me who I am now.

Finding Out About His Wife

I found out about Philip's wife by accident. I told a gay friend of mine, Georgia, that he and I have been seeing each other. He was happy for me, since it had been quite some time since he saw a certain twinkle in my eye, but he told me to be careful. He wasn’t sure though but an old friend of his came from the same hometown as Philip. Like any other small hometown where everybody knows everybody’s business, it was no secret that he had a wife. I was flabbergasted, shocked that he had the nerve to do this to me but at the same time, I wanted to give Philip the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I was hoping he and the wife had separated. Maybe I was hoping that Georgia was just a mean gossip, jealous of my own happiness. Maybe I was hoping that it wasn’t true. So I kept the information tucked at the back of my mind, continued seeing Philip, pretending as if I didn’t know.

Oh, yes, there were times I wanted to broach the topic with him. A few times, I joked with him to greet his three wives for me. That had always been my style, to hide under the humor, the half-meant jokes, and the veiled laughter. I refused to face facts, hated confrontations and preferred pretending that reality doesn’t exist.

I was contented to live in my own perverted version of reality.

Until the day his wife requested to add me through my Friendster.

My Friendster profile is private. Before anybody can view my complete profile, he/she had to request for my permission. I have decided to keep my profile private because of certain people from my past that I wanted to stay away from. When I first saw Midge on the request list, I didn’t think much of it. I thought of her as probably a girl from my gradeschool days who remembered me or a friend of a friend. Imagine my surprise when I clicked Midge’s pic and saw her with Philip and their one-year-old son.

I could have walked away from my laptop then. Walk away and pretend I didn’t saw anything. One click and I could have pretended Philip was still the same person I first knew. But somehow, I found myself reluctantly attracted to the photos, clicking their pictures together one by one, like a show I couldn’t get myself to stop watching.

At the end of the day, I could no longer deny the truth.

I had been seeing a married man.