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Think of a small bar, less than a hundred square meters wide and maybe about four hundred square meters long. It’s so small even its roadside sign seems to apologize for its size; you won’t be able to spot the place when you drive down Shaw Boulevard unless you know where to look. The bar doesn’t have air conditioning. What it has for ventilation are three large windows, waist-high up until the ceiling. The windows have no glass nor a screen, giving you a clear view of the narrow gated alley beside the building.

You enter the bar through a glass door. In front of you is a stage. It’s a very, very small place.

This is Cuerdas Bar. This is where I spend some of my Friday and Saturday evenings.

It’s not the kind of place you and I would go to unless you have a friend or a boyfriend playing there tonight.

I am the only female in the room who isn’t an audience member.

Zoo and friends

The second band just finished playing their set. They’re called Bittersweet and they sound like 90’s Green Day. They’re also the only band I listen to here. Everyone else sounds like a ripoff of a ripoff of My Chemical Romance. Angry teenagers and college freshmen too young to know how shitty life can get. My eardrums ring with the sound of their pubescent screaming. For the life of me I can never figure out just exactly what they’re screaming about.

At Cuerdas, nobody really listens to your band so much as they wait for their turn to play.

This is how I spend some of my Friday and Saturday evenings. Waiting for our turn to play.

Our band is called Zoo and we play the same set of four original songs every time. Until our last gig, I didn’t know what the lyrics to our songs were about. So I had our other guitarist write them down because I wanted to sing back-up. I changed my mind when, during rehearsals, my elementary Tagalog made me sing like a dyslexic child.

It’s already ten-thirty pm and I’m writing this down on a piece of paper I took from the bar because I am bored. We’re tonight’s main band, which means we won’t be playing our set til way past midnight. The next band is setting their equipment up, and it looks like I’m in for another round of indecipherable screaming. I’m amazed that I can still think above Paramore’s new song blaring from the speakers.

In a sea of stripes, skull-patterned canvas sneakers, and checkered fedoras, I amuse myself by giving the seventeen-year old bassist of Bittersweet a long lecture on the importance of going back to school and graduating from college. I am completely sober while I do this. That is how cheerful evenings like this make me.

I go here because our band plays here and I want to get used to playing in front of people so that when I start my own old school punk/grunge band, snarling like Courtney Love will come to me naturally.

During my first performance with Zoo, I set up my equipment with cold hands and pretended not to know which jacks go into which sockets as an attempt to delay the inevitable. I don’t remember when or how I stopped being nervous. I don’t remember why I used to get nervous to begin with. Playing on stage is a safe, legal serotonin fix.

Tonight, I set up my effects with the swift, practiced movements of a guitar veteran of five or six performances. I’m bursting at the seams with four hours worth of waiting time and eardrum death.

Bottles of cheap beer make our skin three shades redder than they should be.

On stage, nothing else matters. Not the papers I haven’t started, not my insecurities, not the constant dread of the future. It’s just me, my four chords, and an audience made invisible by strong stage lights.

Ten minutes and four songs fly by and the fun part is over too soon. I’m still grinning from the rush even though my stomach is starting to sink. I stick around for high fives, a couple of laughs, a gulp from someone’s beer bottle, and a picture. Then I go home.

This is my life. This is one of the things I live for.

We’re playing at a bigger, air-conditioned bar next month.

EDIT: At band practice last night, I found out that Cuerdas Bar closed for good when the karaoke place next door ratted on them to the police for not having to a permit to serve alcohol. WTF.

Microtel Boracay
O hai sponsors sup?

If it were not for our lovely sponsors, I would not have spent last weekend with bloggers in Boracay. It’s funny, because I’ve been to Boracay twice, and I don’t believe I’ve spent more than a thousand pesos for both trips. The first time I was at Boracay, friends from Canada took care of plane fare, my hotel accommodations, and everything else I ate or drank. The plane fare and accommodations of last weekend’s Blogger Boracay Trip was paid for by Seair and Microtel Boracay respectively, with dinner sponsored by Zuzuni on Saturday night. The only time I shelled out any money was when we went clubbing on Saturday night. Even then I didn’t need to order too many drinks because we had some Absolut vodka beforehand, courtesy of the Microtel bar.

My life is made of awesome like that.

My life. It is awesome.

Most people I know who have been to Boracay rave about how Boraaaah is THE place to be at. Take it from me though - it’s not as great as people make it out to be. Or maybe this is because I’m the type of person who’d rather go camping at isolated beaches or shack up at low-key resorts, the kind that don’t have the comforts of home, instead of partying in tourist-trap tropical islands.

I arrived in Boracay late Friday afternoon and was very disappointed to wake up to dark, overcast skies on Saturday morning. Not that it stopped me from attempting to swim in Puka Beach (which isn’t meant for swimming to begin with) and snorkeling out in the sea.

Me and Gail at Puka Beach, pwnt by the waves

A fishies. I can see them!

After a lovely dinner at Zuzuni, we went clubbing. Yay, how totally unpredictable! I was itching to do something completely out of the box though, so I decided to go on a mission that evening. My objective was to make a new friend, and that friend has to be a foreigner. Boracay in January is crawling with tourists from the west and I had difficulty suppressing how envious I was of them. How lucky they are to be in a country so strange and foreign to them! I wanted to get to know someone and live vicariously through his experiences, adventures, and views about the world. And yes, it has to be a guy because girls scare me.

A night life. We has it!

As the night progressed, however, I realized that a discussion like that might have been too much to hope for. I did meet a lot of guys that evening, some too briefly to even consider them an acquaintance. Most of them were only interested in dancing with me or making small talk in heavily accented English. At two separate occasions however, I did get around to have a proper conversation with two guys who told me all about Madagascar, Africa, the villages of northern Thailand. But even these conversations had a small talk-like feel to them. Also, it was difficult to really listen or make yourself heard when there’s a large speaker blaring hip-hop or dance music two feet away from you. I was tempted to ask, “Would you like to go someplace more quiet?” but thought the better of it. I’m Filipino, they’re white - what else do Filipino girls and white guys do in Boracay? They didn’t seem like the sleazebag type but still; the last thing I wanted was to look like I was trying to pick them up. In any case, the conversations never got very interesting and as if on cue, my party companions would drag me out to another bar right when I was running out of questions to ask.

All I wanted to meet that evening was some kind of a kindred spirit, but I suppose Boracay is the wrong place to look for those. You see, people go to Boracay to visit the clubs, drink the booze, get tanned, try out the water sports, and most importantly - have random, anonymous sex. I bet they don’t even notice that the locals live along narrow, dirt-road streets in crowded, hollow-block houses half the size of their hotel room. They bury their cigarette butts in the sand and toss their cellphones overboard. Marc actually spotted an old Nokia phone among the corals while he was snorkeling and fished it out of the water. Yay for decent human beings who remove tourist trash from the sea!

It makes me a little sad about how the hordes of visitors to Boracay don’t really give a damn, but on the other hand, I can understand why they feel that way. The allure of Boracay, according to a Manilenean I talked to there, is that its’ a beautiful escape from the stress and reality she has to deal with back home. That’s not a very telling statement since all vacations are a grounded escape from reality. I think the real allure of Boracay is that it’s a safe, familiar escape. This island, really, is pretty much what fancy mall Greenbelt would be like if you added a tropical beach to it. Boracay’s white sand and white tourists is enough to make you feel like you’re far away from home, but it’s familiar enough so you don’t get culture-shocked by strange customs and unfamiliar languages. It’s a great place to meet strangers, fuck strangers, and act out in any way you want because chances are, everyone will be too drunk to remember all the stupid things you did there. Who you are in Boracay is not who you are in Manila. For people who don’t have the balls to act the way they want to in the city, anyway.

I’m still me wherever I go, though. Idealistic notions about the world and all.

Some unsolicited advice for those of you who are planning to go to Boracay. Wear your tsinelas (or Havaianas, or whatever you call them) as your feet will get wet when you get on and off the boat. Make back-up plans in case of rain. Respect the locals. The beach is not an ashtray, so your goddamn cigarette butts in the trash. And don’t be an idiot and take your cellphone with you when you go out swimming.

Oh, and because somebody on my Livejournal commented that I look like an endorser of Microtel in my photo, Bim took the liberty to make the following awesome adverfisments:

Other entries about the Boracay Blogger Trip:
Boracay Escape with Pinoy Travel Bloggers
Microtel Boracay in Diniwid Beach
Boracay and the Dream
A Long Boracay Weekend with Bloggers
Pinoy Travel and Photo Bloggers Go to Boracay
Microtel Boracay
Bloggers Boracay Bound

It’s true what they say - once you get bitten by the piercing bug, you’re going to want more. And more. Until your body resembles a pincushion and most of genteel society avoids you like the leper in Jerusalem during whatever year Jesus was born.

It’s been over a year since I got my eyebrow pierced, and exactly a year since I got my inverse navel done. In between that time period I got an industrial piercing that semi-freaked out my mom (and which she made me remove after its refusal to heal in three months), and a tongue piercing that REALLY freaked out my parents. I didn’t intend to tell them about the tongue because I knew I could have gotten away with hiding it from them. But despite how “scary” I look with metal through my eyebrow I’m really quite a nice daughter, so I let them know that I had metal through my tongue. I expected them to chalk it up to pre-graduation jitters like they did with my eyebrow but nooo. It got so bad that my mom stormed into my dorm room the next day to give me a lengthy lecture on why a tongue piercing unhealthy and unpleasant and overall bad. When I insisted on taking my chances on the health risks, she told me that my dad refused to see or talk to me until I remove my tongue piercing.

I took out the barbel the next day.

I’ve been itching to get something new on my face as a way to mark the new year, so I asked my mom if I can has a side lip piercing. Unsurprisingly, she said no, but I wasn’t about to drop the issue without a fight. When I asked her why not, she gave me the following reasons:

If I get another facial piercing I will be avoided like the lepers in Jerusalem during whatever year Jesus was born.

“Facial piercings will attract weirdos and will drive decent people away,” my mom said. I argued that I’ve been a weirdo magnet even before I became a pincushion. As for “decent people”? Bah, “decent people” are quick to judge. Just because I have facial piercings doesn’t mean that I spend my spare time shooting heroin and doing everything that moves. I’m willing to bet a lot of money that I’m probably more moral, honest, and generous than all those goody-two-shoes type boys and girls who go to church every Sunday. Besides, if I ever decide to sell my soul to the materialist corporate world again, I can just get rid of the piercing before the job interview.

She does have a fairly valid point though. Assuming that I had a boyfriend who comes from a conservative family, he’d probably dread the day where I have to meet his parents. (Which is not to say that I’d allow myself to end up with someone who’d be ashamed to introduce me to his parents. I’d skewer his nuts with the barbel I used for my tongue piercing before he could ever get ashamed of me.) Girls who have lip piercings aren’t really the type you can take home to mom. Traditional Filipino parents like those girls who are meek like mice and who can’t live their own lives because their own parents won’t allow them to do what they want. I have a sneaking suspicion that if I weren’t my mom’s kid, she’d probably tell her children - especially the sons - to stay far far away from me as possible.

“I just don’t like the way people will treat you if you get any more piercings,” my mom explained.

Silence as I imagined all the looks women and little old church ladies will throw at me if I add more metal to my face. That look of horror mixed with disgust and curiosity as to what would drive such a pretty girl to “ruin her face” like that.

Everyone will think that my parents are bad parents.

“Trust me, it will break our hearts to see you with a lip piercing,” my mom said.

Nothing makes me give in and shut up like the guilt card.

“Not to mention the gossip that we are bad parents,” she added.

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

I’m not sure why old school Filipinos would come to the conclusion that whatever I do with my life is a reflection of how well (or how badly) my parents raised me. Maybe it’s our close family ties and the big say parents have over their childrens’ lives, even when their children are old enough to think for themselves. Maybe Filipinos still believe the Freudian theory that all adult neuroses are caused by parenting mistakes. In any case, I’d hate for anyone to think that I turned out “wrong” because my parents dropped me on the head as a baby.

Of all the bullshit things to teach children about life, none is more false than “It’s your inner beauty that counts.” Whether we like it or not, people will judge us by our appearances and will judge us harshly when we deliberately choose to cross the line between what’s acceptable and what isn’t. Even the West hasn’t gotten rid of stereotype that people who have piercings and tattoos are criminals or mentally unsound. I was slightly offended when a friend from the US thought I grew up a lot because I hadn’t gotten a weird hair color or a new piercing in months. (Since when was wanting to experiment with the way you look a sign of immaturity?) I’d probably get a lot worse than that from people here if I get any more metal on my face.

The thing is, it’s easy for me to be zen about the weird looks from strangers and the inevitable “What have you done to yourself? Bakit mo sinira mukha mo?” from conservative relatives. I really couldn’t care less about what other people think of the way I choose to look. What I do care about is preserving my relationships with the people who matter and making sure I do nothing to damage what we have. My relationship with my parents included. While I’d never allow my parents to make important life decisions for me, like what career path to take or who to marry, they can have their way with the little things. And if never getting another piercing makes them happy - well, so be it.

I still maintain that a lip piercing gives me 1,000 hotness points though.

“Perhaps in twenty years, Filipinos will become more progressive and open-minded about piercings,” my mom said, as though trying to make me feel better.

“Fine,” I grumbled. “I’ll get another facial piercing when I turn forty. At that age, I’m pretty sure nobody’s going to think I got my lip pierced because you toilet-trained me the wrong way or whatever.”

“Go ahead. But you’ll probably have your own kids by then, who’ll police you and ask you to stop trying to act like a teenager by getting all these facial piercings.”

Bah.