A letter to my parents

Somebody (my wife’s niece) showed me a photo of a house today that's for sale in town for P370,000 I think she said. That's about $8600, it looked like a beautiful house from the outside. She thinks I should move to town and it's not a bad idea but I don't know about buying a house. There are also subdivisions outside of town a little ways. The idea of taking DugDug away from Manggahan really feels wrong to me, I don't think it makes children stronger and more adaptive to be uprooted but maybe that's emoting and not thinking. On the other hand, the idea of me continuing to live at Manggahan might be unrealistic. I feel like I am withering inside because of the shunning which has now spread to Dodo and Haiku so I am surrounded on both sides by people who plan to never speak to me again.

The children still have no problem with me. I correct their behavior fairly regularly, and often a lot nicer than how their parents would have done the same thing, and I’m still Buddy.

My wife’s niece, who is the only person in the family who talks to me at length, lives in town with her mother and brother. She also suggested I get some wheels in order to save money in the long run compared to paying per ride for others to drive me.

I also crave the wide open spaces of Manggahan. The neighbors (everyone including Miracleens once I am past Dandy's house) are at least cordial, although things function on the basis of consensus and family loyalty here, not fairness. I am sure that as a sort of car-less goofball who walks around town with a big black bag full of notebooks and reading glasses and stuff gives Haiku the heebie-jeebies as she is ambitious and wants Dodo to be president of the universe although he can't seem to win an election. I am fair game now to be anyone's scapegoat as Dodo plus Dandy equals just plain outnumbered for me. Manong Elzy did not overtly refuse to talk to them but I did not ask him to. In other words I took my problems to his friend Ben and let the request seep down to him, that’s how things work here. Ben promised they would both talk to Dodo and Haiku and when I finally got to Elzy a few days later he'd apparently had time to decide against getting involved any more. I started out to say that people who are seen walking around and don't even have a car are not going to do anything for Dodo and Haiku's social status. I have to wonder what is their real reason for being insulted by my presence as the things she said were absurd, more or less made up, misunderstandings and such all taken out of context, misinterpreted and taken as insults when they weren’t meant that way. It seemed obvious by the way she was screeching and babbling at me the other night that she had been building up a grudge case for a long time while smiling in my face. That sort of thing catches me unawares as I still can't tell the difference between a smile and a smile.

This is not the letter I intended to write, but nothing else is going on and based on how much sleep I'm getting it might be the letter I have to write. I don't need anything from you and there’s nothing you can do. Tampoka threatened me with big butcher knives and said she was going to kill me because when she wouldn't talk to her younger brother Dodo to ask him not to hit me I actually spit in her face, just a little. Not a big loogey, but calling for the police doesn't help and in the context of what was going on, it saved her from being beaten because I was ready to do her in because she as usual took sides with people who threaten me with violence over very small stuff. (I had gone to Haiku’s house to look for my guitar which her son Kent had borrowed a few weeks ago, and Haiku lit into me verbally, I don’t know what all she said.)

A few days later Tampoka was all sweet and stuff and she seemed surprised that I was still spearheading her ambition to get DugDug into private school in town. They don't comprehend moving on and accepting peoples’ differences, they seem to think in terms of revenge, mostly equivalent to "I'm never going to speak to you again,” which to me is infantile because it stifles possibilities, obviously. I never had a close friendship that didn’t have to clear some hurdles, but here they just forget you if you seem to present them with a hurdle. That’s why our house is empty, none of them will attempt the challenge of living with me/us.

I let Tampoka take care of getting the affidavit of consent from Dandy and Rose so we can act as DugDug’s parents in school matters. The short version is that it was illegally notarized before Dandy signed it (which means he can later deny signing it) and what really got to me is that I was referred to as the spouse of (mis-spelled), with no name for me at all. So I went alone to the notary today, she’s known Tampoka for many years and she graciously offered to redo the paper the way I need it done as I am the one who is going to be paying for all this, and if I do buy a set of wheels then I will be driving or more likely paying someone to drive, neither of which I want to do. Well I was very soft-spoken and indirect with the notary and she was more than happy to redo the paper and hold it at her office till Dandy and Rose both show up to sign it in her presence. When I mentioned that I have notarized over 6000 documents she went pale. Of course Tampoka had wheedled P500 out of me to pay for the notarization originally, then wheedled it down to 300 with the attorney and kept the change and lied about it. I am tired of this.

DugDug is still a sparkler and apparently my reason for living, I am too discouraged to care about my hobbies right now but try to twiddle with them a little. I watch a lot of taped reruns and I don’t get enough sleep but last night it didn’t help to turn it off and go to bed as I still couldn’t sleep for a long time.

The night Haiku gave me my supposedly long-needed reaming I saw Kent across the street later as I continued to go house to house looking for my guitar and when I asked him something he ignored me so I flicked his shirt with my finger and said, “Ayaw pagluod sa akoa,” which means don’t ignore me. He went home and told Dodo I had hit him and when I got back to Haiku’s house for more reaming later, Kent started crying and that’s when Dodo came up behind me and slammed me on the arm. He pushed me once and I didn’t react. I just stood there, and told him “Bawal ang pagbunal sa akoa,” it’s forbidden to hit me, and he started shouting at me telling me to go home. Now it’s a circus and the whole neighborhood is gathering to watch so Tampoka jumps between us and starts tearing my clothes and pushing me down in the mud to make it look like I’m doing something, but I’m just standing there and my struggle is now to neither fall down in the mud nor hit my wife because Dodo has gotten himself worked up and made the first move, now if I hit his sister he will beat me to a pulp. I told her to stop pushing me but she wouldn’t.

Finally another Dodo, the son of Manong Elzy, gently put his arm around me and helped me turn toward home. Frontline in the panting party of watchers was Dandy, no doubt disappointed that he didn’t have an excuse to get his licks in. Well I didn’t sleep that night for even 5 minutes, I watched TV for four hours, cleaned up some files, stood in one place for a long time, and wondered what it is going to be like to lose DugDug. Losing DugDug doesn’t have to happen but I can’t imagine volunteering for more of this, and no I don’t feel that I have none of the blame. But the things I have done here that were negative all amounted to complaining, asking people to return things, asking people to pay for things they had borrowed and lost, telling Haiku her son was not telling the truth, refusing to let Haiku’s teenage daughter use my laser printer, etc. On the other side of the scale, the windows in Dodo and Haiku’s house were a gift from me. The springs on his motorcycle were a gift from me. I spent hours just the other day making them DVDs that she had asked me for. And the many times they have borrowed money from me interest free mean nothing to them, because now that they have gone over the line and committed violence of the loud voice and hitting me and pushing me, pride will not let them take it back and because of their status as employer of many people in the neighborhood, they don’t have to.

My wife’s niece says just ignore people like that, and my response is that the only two houses close to mine are now shunning me so that’s a lot of ignoring I am expected to do. Not the kids, Kent and Divine still speak to me (correction later: Divine is now shunning me too) even after I explained to Kent in Visayan the next day (not with his parents there but with an older cousin-in-law there) that his lying to his father and saying I hit him more or less ruined my life. He didn’t add anything to the conversation except to lie some more. But he’s still speaking to me.

I also got reamed by Haiku for asking her the names of the teenage boys who live in her house who have never been introduced to me, I didn’t accuse anyone of anything. As it turned out, Kent or Divine had actually returned the guitar but not upstairs where I keep it, and some other kids used it downstairs, and then one of them or somebody or even Tampoka put it in an unused closet under the stairs that was built around a four-foot-tall termite mound which it is taboo to remove. Dave was the one who turned out to know where the guitar was. I explained to everyone I talked to that it is not about a $30 guitar, it’s about people lying to me and threatening me with violence and worse for my personality defect of sigi yawyaw (always complaining). By worse than violence, I mean that after a certain point the gist of Haiku’s screeching was that she was going to go to the American Embassy and have me thrown out of the country. Well that would ruin my life, if I have one, and she knows that. Threatening me with that was inexcusable, a selfish indulgence on her part. A power tripping act of vengeance for the small insult of not giving them access to my laser printer or whatever compilation of tiny insults has put her over the edge and made me her scapegoat.

Through all of this I didn’t raise my voice, I knew I brought it on myself by not just forgetting about Kent lying and saying he didn’t borrow the guitar. I should have backed off and lost sleep privately because people don’t care about the details and I couldn’t communicate them properly with Haiku hollering at me a mile a minute so I should have left and not come back. It still would have been the end of the friendship but without so many witnesses, and all the witnesses is what made it bad for me because people are going to talk and they aren’t going to take my side, Dodo provides jobs to every family in the neighborhood and that makes him right.

I thanked my wife’s niece for her advice, even though it all involves spending money to make Tampoka happy and that is hopeless. I’ve spent most of my normally online time lately at her family’s Tailoring Shop in town where she is filling in for her mother who is on vacation, and she has been generous with her time so I try to think of a variety of things to talk about as she can’t be expected to take sides. Her mother is Tampoka’s cousin on Tampoka’s mother’s side. But she has let me tell her what is going on and hasn’t judged me (or pretended not to), so that has sort of kept me halfway sane. I told her I could see me moving to town alone in several months, but I’m not going to put my tail between my legs right at this moment and run away. The little children and most of the neighbors call me Buddy and treat me right, Dede and Neyong are friendly. Bebing is here—she’s always here when people get angry at me—and she’s too clever to give me shunning for more than a few days. Her son is on a field trip in Manila right now and I contributed to the cost of that, only about $12. Noel is still friendly but his wife works for Dodo and I detect a trace of something from her. MayMay, who I helped save from a bout with typhoid a few years ago by contributing $150 to her medicine cost, was a witness of Kent’s flicking so Tampoka went with me to their house a block away and I offloaded my frustrations there to the matriarch of the family, Tampoka’s aunt, and MayMay promised to talk to Dodo and tell him I didn’t hit Kent. Kent later claimed he didn’t tell his father I hit him, and it’s possible that it was Haiku who told Dodo I hit Kent. I think she also told Kent to cry louder, believe it or not. Crying here is often unabashedly done as an act to manipulate the results of a dispute. MayMay didn’t talk to Dodo, I am sure, as her mother works for Dodo and she was probably forbidden to. Yesterday her little brother swore at me at the basketball court when I tried to help him with something.

My brain is fairly empty now and I apologize as usual for telling you things that you can’t do anything about. Most of this sort of thing just goes on my blog at blogspot.com but this time I guess I needed to spell it all out because I’m pretty sure my time at Manggahan is almost up. I need to stay till around Christmas or a little before and then what I told my wife’s niece is that I might rent a place in town and see if it’s possible to live alone. With DugDug at Manggahan I don’t know how that would be possible.