Before we sort into man or woman we should create three gender categories: Homosexual, Heterosexual and Undecided. Under each would be Male and Female determined by physical design. This segmentation, I sincerely believe, will make us more accepting and compassionate people because we can name and place everyone. We get mean when we can’t sort things, including people, into neat little rows and put them where they belong. Okay, it’s not going to happen but it’s worth a thought, an imaginative leap on a rainy afternoon. I’m used to people not taking my ideas seriously though certainly they are amused.
A few are amused by my tambiolo theory of destiny, which holds that destiny is not too randomly determined. Actually there are four Destiny tambiolos in the sky. One is the mega-tambiolo where everyone’s name is. Then there’s a tiny one, about as big as a spinning bamboo kulasisi birdcage (if you’re old enough to remember buying birds at the church plaza after Sunday Mass) with only two balls: Continuous and Discontinuous. These balls direct you to corresponding tambiolos. If heaven or limbo or maybe even hell have finally computerized then the tambiolos have been replaced by a computer program, less picturesque but no less random.
Anyway, angels or whoever, depending on your beliefs, draw your name from the mega-tambiolo, then go to the little tambiolo to pick out a ball – Continuous or Discontinuous, C or D. If C, then you will become one of those people who, even if they live to be a hundred, will have fewer than five addresses and phone numbers, only one mate all your lives. You will experience tragedy and major changes but no more than five (an arbitrary figure that feels right to me). In the pendulum swing of things, you are dead center, swinging steadily, ticking regularly along, normal, the norm that people out on the sides are measured against. You are the guys who make people who draw from the D tambiolo look weird.
I’m wrapping up my life. That freaks the hell out of people but it’s true. I am at that stage where I’m looking back and trying to make sense, trying to answer why my life has been so discontinuous. I felt this even more acutely recently when I opened a private writing class for an office I used to work at as an executive. As I entered the ground floor of their new premises, I became extremely aware of how I looked – coolie pants for post-smoking garter waistline comfort, an old knitted undershirt over which a crumpled linen shirt had to be thrown to conceal arms I’ve never wanted anyone to see. I wore slippers, now called slides, a basket bag hung with strange amulets (I love), a bayong holding lesson plan, notebook, scented candle, glass cubes – props of my writing class. Definitely I had morphed from Ms. Barbara to Aling Barang. I remembered the mini-skirted high-heeled woman in her mid-thirties who once worked here, who once won the dubious title Girl I Would Love to Spend One Night With in an informal drunken contest among the young men at that office.
Did I want to be her again? No way, was my emphatic reply. Spare me of those hormonal surges. I am happy clunking along in my funky ale look. The security guard gives me a respectful but puzzled look. I want to reassure him, "It’s just costume, honey, don’t sweat it. I could wear my executive clothes again but they’re in mothballs until I decide what to do with them. I asssure you though, one thing is consistent: I don’t steal. Feel better?" I think he did because he didn’t check my bayong.
Sometimes I think I must be queen of the D tambiolo. I tried to count the number of places I had lived – over 30 and that didn’t include the number of times we moved when we lived in Syquia apartments, where my mother moved into every apartment that was vacated. She loved moving and so do I. Now that I have been a year in what people tend to call my dream house, I’m seriously thinking of putting it in the market simply to find out what else I might do. My friends see me as the destroyer of their address books. Not only have I moved residences and offices a million times, I’ve moved out of the Philippines and returned and now I’ve moved to Calamba. No moss grows on this rolling stone. My mother too is a rolling stone. Many of us in my generation in my family are.
The defining moment I think came at the end of World War II when on the eve of Manila’s liberation, less than 24 hours in fact, all the men in our family were slaughtered by the Japanese. I think about this more and more as I wind down my life and try to make sense of it. Our men made it through the war alive until the last 24 hours. Then in an instant they were gone leaving us behind, a startled clutch of women and babies who had to become fearless and start again. Is it possible that then we could not stop, that life for us meant starting over and over and over again, changing over and over and over again, that this is how we preserve our tenuous connection to that singular night that carved out destiny? I force models of logic on myself trying to explain the discontinuity that seems to have marked many of our lives. It has to be the D tambiolo. That’s the only theory that makes sense, the logical answer. Thank God that once in a while I am capable of logic.