Sunscreen and long drives

"If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunsreen would be IT"
- Everybody's Free (to wear sunscreen), Mary Schmich

From where I'm sitting, truer words have never been spoken.
I headed to San Juan, La Union over the Easter weekend to meet some friends for some sun and sand, and in their case some surfing.
I only realized the idiocy of forgetting to put on sunscreen in the tropics when I woke up yesterday morning. It wasn't pretty. Thank heavens I woke up in Baguio (yes, we idiotically drove back right after, but that's another story).
Now that I'm back in the urban jungle of Makati with the heat and humidity, all I want to do is sit in a bucket of ice cold water.
It was, all in all, an interesting weekend. All the driving up and down provinces made me realize something - I may whine about being the default driver on road trips, but I give in not because I have to but because I actually want to.
I like being in the drivers seat. That much I now know.
Besides getting better and better at navigating Marcos highway (my friend closes her eyes when she thinks I'm going too fast while negotiating a curve - wahehe), I find the pre-occupation one way of surviving an extremely looonng trip.
When you're driving, you have no time to get bored, you can opt to not join in the small talk from the backseat, and you are free to cuss like a sailor no matter how many elders are in the car with you.
When you are at the wheel, you have a temporary sense of purpose - keep yourself and your passengers safe, out of danger and to get to your destination in one piece. Alive. That in itself is (for me) some twisted sort of reprieve from the mundane responsibilities the world hoists on our shoulders.

Dungbeetle thoughts

She had been sitting at the cafe all afternoon, squinting into a laptop, which was hard to work on because of the reflection of the harsh midday sun.

She was finding it hard to concentrate as she thought she saw her least favourite nemesis pass by - twice.

It must have been all the heat and caffeine causing this paranoia. There was no way that bitch would be at THIS cafe, she tought.

That woman could invade every waking moment of her past life but there was no way she would let that idiotic, simpering little hussy take over her sacred cafe space. Plus, the idiot probably didn't know the difference between a latte and a frapp. Horrible statement to make. But in her head, it was justified.

That most of the past couple years were invaded by inconsistent thoughts of self doubt, self loathing, and decreased self esteem because of this insipid piece of humanity made her head ache even more. How could she have been so stupid?

The resident cat had found something interesting by the hedges. It was a dead (or dying) mouse. Miaow promptly decided it was worth some private play time with, and dragged it into the safety of the hedges.

How apt she thought, a dead mouse to go with your reverie.

It bothered her that every ordinary girl with a short, shapeless haircut and regular conformist features now all seemed to morph into her imagined foe.

Was she subconsciously trying to find the bitch to finally get it over with and get rid of her irrational fear of meeting her face to face? Or did she just enjoy torturing herself with the image of the girl she had figuratively lost to, a girl she had perceived to be less than her in every way imaginable?

The cat had re-emerged and had dragged out with it the remains of the dead mouse it had earlier found. It was now gnawing away at whatever bits were left of the rodent.

John Lennon was singing in the background and the sun had decided to give it a rest. The cafe had filled with the usual cast of students, yuppies, businessmen and ladies who lunched. She had to get out of here soon.

Screw the past she thought. It isn't your concern how her miserable little life goes. If that rodent was anything to go by, the past was on its way to getting fucked while you still had a future of unlimited possibilites and the creativity to indulge in more interesting pursuits.

St. Elmo's fire isn't hard to get

St Elmo's fire isn't real. - Rob Lowe, St. Elmo's Fire

Like the statement above, your preconceived notions that you know anything about anything - they aren't real.

Take the movie, for example...You spew rhetoric and gush over it but... I highly doubt your hypothalamus was ever really able to comprehend the magnitude of it's impact on twenty something college grads during its time. You probably just went along with the cute coupled thoughts of peers hanging out at a bar after work.

I don't claim omniscient knowledge of the inner workings of the flick from the director's point of view, but I do claim comprehension of the concepts, emotions and the myriad subtle sub-plots that the characters tried to portray that you will NEVER understand.

The female leads, for one, are independent women who have a backbone - something you apparently forgot to grow.

St. Elmo's fire was mine before your saccharine brain even began its laborious duty of trying to understand some of the concepts tackled in the film.

The storyline is simple enough. You should get it.

Watch the film another twenty times...lets hope you at least get the plot this time.