shoe whore chronicles

when durga is a caffeinated wreck, lots of things can happen. she can, for instance, call up suzee, her shopping partner in crime and go to the mall to go shoe shopping.
tadaaa!!!!



durga is a happy girl. sleepless, but happy. noo-ni-noo-ni-noo.

home sweet home

jane is fun, but she's a handful. my apartment looks like my room in catalan beehive no. 1 (my college apartment shared with adinda,and la-u) magnified 10 times.
if my mom can see it now, she'll throw a fit!

i really should stop and clean-up. there are still boxes to be unpacked, laundry to be washed and folded. books to be shelved and mail to be sorted.

i have to stop drinking anything with caffeine. i'm like that catatonic kid tweek tweak from south park. my eyes are killing me, my head is rebelling but my fingers keep typing on this keyboard and my right foot is on auto thump, faster than that rabbit in bambi.


i wish someone can tell jane to clean my apartment and get her ass off my computer chair. she should also stop bothering all the people who are online on her YM and chikka messenger.

the question is : will she listen?

make a guess. bitch is a pain in the neck.

baby you can drive my car

background music : ovedrdrive by the eraserheads


i have a total of 4 hours of sleep in the past 24 hours. i am running on diet pepsi and dunkin donuts toasted almond coffee (with milk, no sugar - warm, not hot). my knees are shaking, my fingers can't stop fiddling with this keyboard and my eyes are killing me.

i went to a job interview today. the school where i have to be interviewed is located 24 miles away from where i live. this already FAR for me. 24 miles is my weekly mileage with bruce. i was very nervous about this trip because i am scared shitless of driving the highway. i was so nervous, i woke up at 4 am this morning. by 4:30 i was already at dunkin donuts for coffee - half caf of course for i didn't want a bumbling nervous wreck behind the wheel. and so by 7am, i said my prayers and head off to the picturesque NJ turnpike. i bought a nuvi 200 to help me get around. it was pretty good considering i got to my destination in 40 minutes. this GPS navigator charly and i baptized amy is more annoying than my old palm pilot tomtom GPS navigator called lori.

the drive was pretty okay, though the ramps and the gigantic trucks terrified me. the toll gate experience was not so bad either.

i'm slowly coming to terms to my fear of driving the highways. next weekend i'm off to a 4 hour drive to Maryland. We'll see how that goes. But, with good weather (i hope), great music, amy and bruce almighty at my side, i'm looking forward to an awesome roadtrip.

child's play

background music : back on the chain gang by the pretenders

My mom never let me took siestas as a child because I would be up all night and screw up everybody’s sleep. On the very rare occasions that I did doze off, everybody pretty much left me alone. But not my evil aunt and cousin – the evil twins, Charry and Jocel. They used to sneak into my other aunt’s room and wake me up with the sole intention of pissing me off.

You know what they say about how it is better to play jokes on a drunk, but never on a person who just woke up? That is so true with me. You never, EVER wake me up in the afternoon – I turn to little hulk and destroy everything in my path. The evil twins know this all too well and they wake me up for the exact purpose of watching me destroy whatever toys I have. After the carnage, I would go back to my little negrita mode and cry myself silly for wrecking my toys, much to their delight. They would then run off and tell on me. I would get punished for destroying my toys and I will be told I will not be given any more. Only my dad would take my side and soothe my little broken heart with a wink and a promise that he will buy me a new toy when he can.

Those two really sucked. Thank goodness I’m pretty well-adjusted now, otherwise I’d probably be this nervous cowering and stuttering wreck. You would if you had to spend your formative years with these two. Here’s a menu of the games we used to play :


1) Hide and Seek - For some reason, I am always it. And for some reason, I had to count 1 to 67 when we play this game. Of course I never find these two because they would be well out of the hiding perimeters and I would usually find them back inside my grandma’s room watching cartoons like nothing happened.

2) The Office game - We set up under the big round table. We have old phones and paper and pens and postcards and pretend that we work in an ultra important office. Of course the twins are the big bosses and I’m the secretary. Not much fun since they always order me around.


3) The Playhouse game - My grandma had a bahay kubo built for us. It was pretty neat actually. It was a good sized nipa hut furnished with a bunk bed, a kitchenette for our clay pots and stove, a working sink – the works. We even had a sign nailed to the post “La Casita 123" for us three senoritas. So we would play house – another genius game for the evil twins for Jocel would be the dad, Charry would be the mom. You’d think I’ll be the kid right? Nope. I’m the maid. I’m Inday, thank you. I had to wash the dishes, gather leaves for our pretend food and clean the house! I sometimes wonder if it would be a more fun game if I was the dog, Bantay. They’d probably treat me better those two buggers!

4) Road runners - As my parents were still both struggling with money, I did not have a bike for myself. There was a bike in my grandma’s, but the evil duo naturally hogged it. It was a three-wheeler, a nifty little blue bike where one can stand at the back while the other rides it. Of course there was no room for a third person. Everyday I hope would be my lucky day when they would let me ride with them. I usually have to wait for them to go have their daily siesta so I can ride the bike, but that wasn’t much fun. So one day, the ever resourceful little Joffin asked Tubal, the gardener if she can use the wheelbarrow so she can go “ride” with the evil twins. You can probably guess what happened. I ended up playing rickshaw-wallah to these two. Grrr.
Not a lot of fun either.


and last but not the least ...

5) The Superfriends Game - I hate hate hate this game. I’ve always wanted to be Wonderwoman . I would use my magic lasso and tie up the evil twins,lock them up in my invisible jet and drop them off to Tawi-tawi or some distant uninhabited island. But no. The evil twins have to be the Wondertwins and of course yours truly can only be... Gleek! – the frigging monkey. Sigh.



Good times.


So yeah, pretty much that was my preschool childhood with the evil twins. When I started school I loved it. I was very active in school and I had a lot of nice playmates. I usually played with the boys because their games were so much fun. The girls usually played with their Barbie dolls and mine were all decapitated, so I didn’t really play those until I was in second grade when my dad bought me two replacement Barbie dolls for the two that I had mutilated one frenzied afternoon after being woken up by the twins.



Time space warp......


I got my day of justice one summer day in 1999 when Jocel visited us after 18 years of living in the states. I cornered both Charry and Jocel and gave them a mouthful of my pent-up anger. They got a bit scared of me because I barely gave them any space to butt in. They vehemently denied being mean to me of course. I told them to shut up and listen to me, for once. I said I should actually thank them for those things that they did because somehow it helped me toughen up and become a well-adjusted young adult, I just warned them that what they did may come back and bite them in the ass one day, when somebody else would decide to bully their future children.


I walked away feeling good that they had a lot to think about.


Noo-ni-noo-ni-noo.

the miseducation of joffin-mari 1

when i was about 4, i asked my dad why boys pee standing and why girls pee sitting. i suppose he was preoccupied with something and just brushed off my silly little why question. he turned to me, and told me that it's just the way it is.

but of course little ol' me wouldn't take a brush off answer just like that. so for a few years, i would occasionally pee standing (mostly at home, and i think once in my grade school bathroom) just to shed a bit of light to my question.

this topic came up last night and so i asked d why this is so, with the boys standing. he casually said that guys can pee sitting, too. this was kinda like how the conversation went :

me : no you can't
d : yes you can
me : you can?! but it would be too messy!! (horrified)
d : why would it be messy?
me : uhm, because if you don't hold your thing down it'll squirt over?
silence
d : uhm why do you have to hold it?
me : well, isn't it supposed to be hard when you pee?
silence
laughter
the sound of mortification on my side

d : how long have you lived with this guy?
me : uhm, six years.
d : and you never saw this peeing?
me : never really observed.
muffled sounds of mortification again


okay. so sue me. I REALLY DID NOT KNOW. okay? honest! i mean sure i've seen the guy pee, but i assume it's always you know hard, well maybe because it's the morning pee and the morning wood combined, so i just assume it's always like that, and that's why guys can't pee sitting.

okay, point number 2 : my brother JP has to be guided in the bathroom to pee, and as his older sibling it wasn't a big deal to me. yes, it wasn't always hard, but i just assumed that because there is something developmentally wrong with my brother, that he was an exception.

there. fine. i have been naive on this thing okay?

i told someone back then that i was too smart for common sense.


i wished my dad just answered my question when i was four and saved me the humiliation of not knowing a simple truth.


and that's all i have to say about that.

durga, la conquistadora

background music : yummy by gwen stefani



after three months of camping out in my living room couch, i have finally reclaimed the bedroom.
(applause, applause) in my best elvis presley voice "thank you very much"



right after the dissolution of my marriage, sleeping was optional for me. my mind was too preoccupied with booting, rebooting, deleting and reprocessing painful information to even have the time to add sleep to its overworked playlist.

i drank wine to make me fall asleep. i even took some over the counter sleep aid just so i can get some shut eye so i can make it through work somehow semi-normal. i slept in the couch which was a bit uncomfortable, really.

i stayed out of the bedroom not because it reminded me of impassioned or otherwise coitus with the ex. the bedroom did not haunt me like that. it was the empty space and the resounding silence in the room that unsettled me. i used my bed as a dump site for laundry that needed to be folded, i used the bedroom as my closet.

the past couple of weeks i had a major change of heart and mind. as if roused from an emotional coma, my old self bounced back blinked her eyes and said "screw it, shit happens, what are you gonna do?"

and so i retraced my steps into the room that i feared most. i sat by the bed and felt its comfortable softness. i lay down and stared at the ceiling for what seemed like hours. i mused at the possibilities of having the bed to myself. i don't have to worry about space. i can leave as many books as i want. i can hog all the pillows. ahhh, it's so not bad after all.

durga, victorious once more, has reclaimed the bedroom and declared it as a sanctuary for peaceful slumber and fantastic dreams.

if only the couple upstairs can keep their boinking down, it would be perfect.

Me and my f*** me pumps

background music : F me pumps by amy winehouse


i'm going out on a date in a couple of week's time. this is going to be my second date in 16 years. i feel as excited as the first time i went to the prom with a date.
i have a laundry list of things to do in preparation for this event, and the star of this whole production is none other than my first pair of high heels. my chocnut richard baptized it my "f*** me pumps". while laughing with him on the phone, he prompted me to tune in to amy winehouse's video of the same title. it was a trip.

being just a little bit above 5 feet sucks. i always get frustrated when i shop for greceries because i have to ask people to reach stuff for me. several times in the school cafeteria, the lunch lady yelled at me, thinking i was one of the obnoxious 6th grade girls. when i went out with date#1 i felt like a midget. he was 6'2", i barely reached his shoulders. but it felt great standing next to a tall guy. i felt protected. i felt cute.

my girlfriend eva, the makeover queen, convinced me to buy a pair of heels for jeans. she said (with nikki's approval) that wearing high heels with jeans changes everything. it makes your ba-dunk-kadunk and twins stick out. they were right of course. when i put on these shoes which i have baptized amy (for that crackwhore winehouse who richard and i both love) in the shoe salon, i heard aerosmith's "walk this way" in my head. true, my fear of heights came back. i felt like i was on the empire state building. but man, they did make me feel sexay!

i don't know about most women, but i usually plan my outfits around shoes. for amy, i have purchased my first pair of joe's jeans which i am breaking in as i type this post. they feel a little snug right now. but a reliable source told me that i should feel snug in them in the first few days. it will contour to my body just fine after breaking them in a few days.

i have three tops to choose from. i have the perfect lipstick. the eye make-up i'm playing with, and the accessories are pretty much set.

let's just hope the date is also a perfect fit with me and my f*** me pumps.