The Whale Will Lose Weight (Chapter Two), and Other Things

What You Learn While Jogging:

1. There are two inconvenient things that could plague you while you're out on an evening run:

a.) While bounding off halfway through your first round, it occurs to you that your bowels are acting like some petulant 5-year old, wanting to go and wanting to go right now, Mommy. So you're breathing pretty steadily and your pace retains its beat, and maybe some bystander would throw a glance at you and think, Look at her, she's the wind now. But the truth is that every toilet you pass by taunts you brutally. The truth is that you just want to take a dump. Right fucking now.

b.) You are coasting past the trees, the cars whizz by you, the evening breeze is fine and the sweat makes your shirt cling to your back. If only you had a sexy back. But that isn't your problem right now. What's bugging you is that as you're weaving your way through the campus, a thread of snot is climbing down from your right nostril down to your philtrum, it threatens to crawl further on to your upper lip. What to do, what to do!! You don't have a hankie or a handtowel with you. You want to give your sleeve a try, but you're too embarrassed to do that: you're no caveman, certainly not. It must be the way the temperature drops in the evenings now. Instead, you snort and sniffle as you go along, you know you are beginning to sound like some elephant with rhinitis, and really, what a bitch it is.

2. Listen, this is all it takes for you to start sprinting for dear life: a skinny guy with a baseball cap on, obscured somewhat by an imposing palm tree, standing by the pathway you're treading down on, and jacking off feverishly. You don't know who the hell this bastard is. All you know is that you were minding your own business, feeling rather proud of yourself for another hour of sustained jogging, and boom you see him just 5 feet away from you, some farthead with nothing better to do than masturbate in plain sight of the world. At first you are calm. Or you convince yourself that you are. Seconds later, you break into a run, this is the fastest you'd ever gone. You could have won the Olympics, have you ever thought of that? Very cool.

3. Sometimes it is the sky, the landscape that breathes for you. It is all that you want.

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Today, I remember my cousin, Ryan, who died when he was 18. He was found suspended from the ceiling of his room one evening, a length of cord wound around his neck. His face was blue. I don't recall exactly when he died. I was in High School, and he called me his favourite cousin.

During his funeral, strains from the song Yesterday by The Beatles floated around like motes. He picked the song himself, he wanted it played specifically for the occasion.

It must have been all that he wanted.
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The Whale Will Lose Weight (Chapter One)

Riding on an extraordinary wave of self-assurance, I decided to jumpstart my mission to lose weight by going jogging last night. This week, I thought, this week is when you will start sloughing the pounds off your lardy ass, lady. So I stalked off confidently down Katipunan to Ateneo at around 6 p.m., calculating a shitload of calories in my head, feeling rather good about myself, keeping some sort of rhyth--

What the hell--?

I stopped some yards away from the overpass and peered at my left foot. Something is seriously wrong with the way this shoe is bouncing, I thought. Now, I know New Balance shoes are supposed to put some spring in your step, and a deluded part of me is also of the opinion that New Balance running shoes can thrust your Coolness Points up so high, Conan O' Brien might ask you to be a guest in his show. Max Weinberg might even flirt with you, a development you will coyly encourage, you little fox you.

Anyway. The point is that New Balance makes some of the best shoes you can go running in. But last night, when I was on my way to go jogging, I peered at my left foot and realized that almost half the sole of my running shoe was hanging off miserably, saved only by a patch that was still clinging to the tip of the shoe.

This is not good.

You cannot go jogging when your shoe is in such disrepair.

But you have to exercise.

How embarrassing. With this shoe, I have totally become uncool. Max Weinberg won't want to date me anymore.

So instead of jogging, which would've made me look like a fool with half the sole of my shoe flapping about, I decided to strike a compromise and opted for brisk walking instead. I strode around the campus for about an hour and fifteen minutes, huffing out to the overpass when I was finished. A streetkid I was friendly with met me there, and she grinned and took my hand. "Hello!" I said, rolling about in an expansive mood. I was feeling so great about myself, I would have danced the cha-cha with her. Those endorphins sure were working their stuff. She smiled up at me.

"Ate, parang tumataba ka."

It's just. Not. Fair.
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When I was much younger and going through the motions of early puberty, I was raring to finally get to my twenties, driven by the belief that adults did not get zits.

High School was a ridiculous time, as far as self-discovery went. I was a pretentious little twit. I thought I knew everything that could be known, with the exception of Mathematics, whose meticulous paths were the sort I could never ramble through without tripping headlong into a thorny bush. It was also a period when my self-consciousness was at its most acute. I was convinced that the number of pimples I got was inversely related to my chances of luring in the guy I had a crush on, and who (I am now equally convinced) didn’t even know I existed.

In any case, I was desperate for clear skin. For a long time, I bought tube after tube of anti-acne gel, and prayed for the day when I would turn 20. By then, I thought, the insane party my hormones were throwing would have died down. Everything would be so fantastic!!

Well. I am now 23 years old. There is currently a massive zit growing on my nose. And my hormones are no better, either. They’re still in the middle of that goddamned party they’ve been having for 10 years. The neighbors are furious, they are calling the cops.

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“He is being such an ass,” Ren said.
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Fuck. That was the worst birthday ever.
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