terribly homesick

mchottie as mcdaddy II

The names of McHottie’s eldest daughter and one of his twins are Isabella and Maya. Isabel is my daughter’s third name and we call her ‘Maya’, from her second name Malaya. :-)

Keisha Chambers is sooooooo lucky. I hope she knows that.

Justin has a twin, BTW.  

mchottie as mcdaddy

McHottie talking about his wife and his marriage and their kids. As Rachel Ray says, either Justin and Keisha are the perfect couple or he’s lying. Or they’re not perfect and he’s not lying at all. How could you not love this guy?

RR: you and your wife keisha… 15 years, and in your business that’s like 29 years! any secrets?

JC: ah, sense of humor, you know we’re really about family, we’re parents, we have a strong faith and our kids rock and, i mean we’ve been parents a long time and that’s a big part of the relationship so…

RR: did you guys always want a big family, did you both come from big families?

JC: i do, but i don’t think that was in the cards in the beginning. it just kinda happened that way but, you know, it’s a great blessing and i don’t remember life, really, before.

RR: are you getting nervous, cause now (your kids) they’re getting close to their teenage years.

JC: i’m not super-excited about that period. you know you just wana give them a certain self-awareness and sort of security with themselves that they don’t lean towards jerks and, you know, i mean there’s five of them they’re all gonna go where they need to go but, just keep them in check and hopefully they turn out good.

RR: how many girls? four out of the five right?

JC: four, four girls.

RR: wow, you’re outnumbered in your house brother.

JC: i know, i know. and they’re all strong latin women so it’s kinda…

RR: you’re quiet at home, aren’t you?

JC: yeah at times. yeah.

RR: do the kids know how famous you are, or do you guys try to keep them grounded…?

JC: they’re like whatever. they’re like whatever.

RR: so you’ve been married for 15 years and uh, who wins? who wears the pants in the family?

JC: fifty-fifty.

RR: fifty-fifty!!! aren’t you guys just the perfect couple? are you lying about all these stuff? we’re best friends, we really love family…

JC: no, no, we’re not perfect. we definitely have issues, too, at times. you know, its part of it, the ups and downs of a relationship. but what attracted me about my wife is that she was so cool and so secure with herself and yeah, good sense of humor. it’s worked so far, day by day.

mchottie!

I have just found out that Justin Chambers voluntarily checked himself into the psych ward of UCLA Medical Center in January for a sleeping disorder (he’d go for a week with only an hour of sleep. yup, tinext nya ako hehe.). It’s the same facility where Britney Spears was kept for bipolar disorder.

Yes I know it’s a sacrilege to have britbrit’s name right there with JC in the same paragraph, but by contrast I wanted to show how one can be a big star in Hollywood and not fly off the handle. I mean, where is the sense in courting publicity and then doing crazy things that get you more publicity and then losing your ground and blaming the publicity for it?

Justin Chambers is a sensible man (the key word being ‘man’), one of few who kept their wits about them and are riding the ups and downs of fame while staying above the weather.

I have nothing but the hots for him on all levels. I wanna cry.

how much is P500?

I found myself trying to block the view to the ATM screen and tucking away the bills as soon as they came out, embarassed about having that much on my hands while the crowd around me have been camped out here since 2AM to claim the P500 Meralco refund.

For five hundred pesos, they made the trip down from their villages in the outskirts and tread the still slippery storm-ridden paths. For five hundred pesos, they spent half the night out in the cold, with nothing to sit on but wet pavement. For five hundred pesos.

The numbers I was trying to hide from their view was not much. Everyone knows a state salary doesn’t get very far. But surrounded by hundreds who will thereafter be braving hot sunshine and humidity standing in line for P500 pesos, a few thousand on my hands made me feel rich, and undeservedly so, because I work in an airconditioned office and sleep in a well-ventilated room and spend for car fuel possibly their entire living for a month.

dr. karev. (sigh.)

I dreamt of Dr. Alex Karev last night. We were part of a live-in training, like the mission school I had with ICPE, and he was this strikingly handsome guy who wears white undershirts torn at the sleeves and a khaki jacket and pants and says to me “amputi mo yata ngayon?” during my worst hair moment.

In the next installment, he was a boarder at my grandmother’s house in Basco. Someone seemed to have hurt him so he came to the room, where I was talking with Lila, to say goodbye. He said he had decided to go to Africa. He sat beside Lila and reached for me with both arms, kissed me on the lips, and hugged me. It was so real. So real. Surreal. When I woke up I wanted to go back to sleep again.

You know how sometimes, when you have a dream about someone, you wake up with that weird feeling you can’t shake off and that affects you the whole day? The dream seems to change how you see or feel about that person and now you feel a certain closeness to him/her. When that person is a character in a soap opera, you know the warm feelings are silly. Except that in my dream there was no silly.

first storm with baby

What bothered me was not so much the winds that howled that night but the fact that typhoon Frank came and went without my having a clue as to its direction, size or strength. I did not even know its path. I mean, I track storms. I have almost never been through a storm without three sets of projections in my head.

There were heavy rains already by Friday, and, since the power was out we went up to bed early. The power came back on at 8PM. The winds began to whirl violently past midnight, and the power went out again shortly. That’s when I realized it was Frank.

I could hardly sleep after that. It was my first storm with a baby and we were riding out the storm “blind.” I had no information to base decisions or hopes on and I felt helpless.

My mobile phones, my only source of light to check on the baby, went out of battery power before dawn. The windows were all shut except for the small window in the bathroom downstairs, but with almost no ventilation I was worried the four of us would use up all the oxygen upstairs before morning. I feared so much for baby, who was very quiet during that night. She must have been lulled by the rain and howling outside.

All that, and I go to work this morning and read the news about a ferry sinking in the Visayas the night of the storm. 700 were feared dead, including children.

Children. In my mind, while reading that news story, I could see fifty-foot waves (images from Perfect Storm) and the ferry sinking while the rain poured. I could see the ferry sinking, and the faces of the children. And every one of them is mine. They all had my baby’s face on them, as I imagined how the parents who were grieving right that moment felt. It was too much. I ran to the bathroom just in time, and burst into tears.