Friday, June 24, 2005
Odd ends
Swiss Delice’s Marc de Champagne has become a favorite of mine since… well… since Saturday Boss brought some for me when he came back from Rome. I mean it, the brand is really good. It’s a break from the Cadburys, Hershey’s, and Toblerones in the market.
I remember Carla (an officemate who resigned after three weeks on the job because she wanted to attend The Law School) once teased me that it’s my biases that makes me think the chocolate is good. There’s that but I simply had to say that Saturday Boss also brought me a rosary but she doesn’t see me praying. Ha!
***I miss SB’s goddamn scrapbook. I need another project. My hand is itching. My Leeko 3D pens are waiting. I need to paste, glue gun, design something, anything.
Should I start next year’s gift? Didn’t somebody say that I have to outdo myself next year? Breathe, my friends, breathe. I have no plans of doing anything like that anytime soon. Besides, I don’t give the same gift twice. And there’s no milestone next year. It’s just another year, another candle in the cake. Next year, I’ll give him something unimaginative, plain, and utterly boring…
…Like sending a huge cake with a stripper inside. Or dressing Guyito with edible underwear. Or housenap his place and paint the walls of his bedroom black. Or shave the fur off the back of his cat. Or go with my original fantasy: make him eat rabbit stew! (For a few days now, I’ve been obsessing about rabbit stew. I hope
Pammy fattens her rabbit so we could eat it, ho-ho-ho).
***Back in high school, I used to write every single day to a friend whom I’ve known since freshman year. Her classroom was next to mine. Though we would often talk after classes, I would still pour my heart out in those letters.
After school, I’d go to a small gift shop located on the street (Asturias Street) across our building to see if they have new stocks of stationeries. They always have. I’d used the little money I have to buy beautiful letter sets from Korea.
The phrases on those stationeries made little sense to me, but I loved the designs—Coke bottles, Fila shoes, map of the world, anime sketches, name it. I especially liked it when the envelopes were made of transparent plastic.
My letters would contain the daily trivialities of life, sometimes girlish angst, sometimes gossip. This would go on for a year, but not once did she reply to any of them.
“It’s just not my style,” she said when we’ll have this heart to heart talk at the sides of the campus’s soccer field.
She got booted out from school on our senior year. The first few months we would talk on the phone. We would cry and share our hatred towards the teacher who had caused all this pain.
But we were so young and we learned to go on with our lives separately. The phone has stopped ringing. And since I can no longer hand deliver my letters to her; I had to snail mail them to her house. The frequency of the letters, of course, suffered. But soon I grew tired of mailing her that I just stopped.
Three weeks before graduation, a classmate handed me a box. My friend dropped by she said but immediately left. Inside the box was my graduation gift.
It contained a Cookie Monster stuff toy (she chose it because I loved the color blue then) and a notebook.
The notebook was her journal, only it was addressed to me. It contained photos of her new-found friends, her uniform patch, her school id, and other mish mash of memorabilia. At the beginning of each page she’d begin with “Dear Ruth,” then she’ll go on and tell me about her day.
Some of the pages were smeared… of tears? I’ll never know. She still said that writing letters was not her style. She wrote in Filipino because her English is not so great. I know she took great efforts to make her handwriting legible.
Now, that notebook is collecting dust in my room. But every once in a while, I take it from the shoe box where it is contained and read it again… especially when I feel like the world doesn’t like me very much.
This is why I love making scrapbooks. I want my friends to have something that would remind them that they are loved.
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