25 Random Things About Me

I realized that I never got round to updating the “About Me” page, so I’m updating it now. I’m re-posting something I put on Facebook 2 years ago.

DISCLAIMER: The following post might be too emo-ish for some people’s taste. Do not read if you are in and want to stay in a good mood. Hahaha.

1. I hate shit like this. I don’t usually have the patience for spam posts, but what the hell. I haven’t updated my blog in a really long time, I miss writing, and this is pretty close to blogging so whatever.

2. My Mom and Dad met while they were working together. My Dad was actually my Mom’s boss. It’s kinda ironic that now one of my strictest rules is that I should never date or hookup with anyone from the office, and I even prohibit the people on my team from doing the same. If my parents had the same rule, I probably would never have been born. So anyway, my Dad found work in Papua New Guinea and asked my Mom if she wanted to work there with him. She did, and moved there with him. They got married there, without telling anyone back home. Lots of people were shocked when they got back to the Philippines and were wearing wedding rings. While my parents were in Papua New Guinea, they created me.

3. You can tell when I met someone or what relationship we have based on the name that they call me. My immediate family calls me Josef. Some relatives call me Kiko because when I was a kid I loved Kiko Matsing from the Batibot show. College friends call me Joe. Most people from the office call me Josie (a name that was given to me by customers over the phone who thought I was a women), and some of teammates call me either Mother or Mama Josie. Romi calls me Pussy, and Domeng calls me Anak. Martina alternates between Josie, Ninang, and Acheng. People from G4M call me Zeph (because of my nick, “ZephyrInTheSky”), and I’m OK with that because it sounds close to Josef. Only my (ex-)boyfriends call me Sef. I prefer being called Josef, but if you call me by any name other than what I’ve gotten used to you calling me, I’ll wonder if you’re pissed off at me.

4. I have 3 siblings. After me came my brother, Oliver, who has mild autism. I struggled a lot with his autism when I was a kid. I would always be jealous of how he’d always get more toys or get away with so many more things because he was autistic. There was a particularly dark period when I thought he had taken one of my school books and thrown it away, so in the middle of the night I went to his bed with a knife in my hand and I was seriously planning to stab him to death. Thankfully something brought me to my senses, and I forced myself to kiss his forehead instead. When I found out later that my friend had actually borrowed the book and I had just forgotten it was with him, I felt so guilty. Me and Oliver are OK now, and I’ve forgiven myself for not being more understanding as a kid. I’ve also come to accept that when my parents are too old to take care of him, he will have to come live with me so I can keep an eye on him.

5. My youngest siblings are Lisa and Jelu. If there’s any people I love the most in the world, it’s them (and my Mom, of course). They were little kids when I was going through my angsty, suicidal teenage years. I never actually attempted to kill myself, but I really didn’t think I had anything worth living for at that time, and was morbidly fascinated with getting run over by cars, getting murdered by kidnappers, etc. The one thing that stopped me from actually doing anything and sort of stopped me thinking about wanting to die period was that I really wanted to see how my baby sister and brother would grow up. I couldn’t imagine not seeing them growing up. Needless to say things have been rosier since I was a teenager, but I’ve always said to myself that if God forbid Lisa or Jelu ever felt unimportant that I would tell them how important they are to me and basically how they’re the reason I’m still alive.

6. I was started school when I was 4 years old, and by the time I was 5 I was in the equivalent of Grade 2. I remember feeling so stupid because my classmates were all writing stories when I could barely read. In hindsight, I was obviously too young to be in the grade I was in, but whatever. I was put in a special class, and learned to color books and all that shit alone. I only started feeling smart in Grade 6 when I could answer all the questions that no one else in class could and people started teasing me about being the teacher’s pet. Well, it was more like torture than teasing, because seriously the whole class ganged up on me every morning, and I mean every morning. During lunch breaks I hung out with the dweebs who didn’t know what condoms were. I did, though.

7. When I was 5 years old I was playing with a friend and we were jumping around tables with metallic edges. She tripped, and cut her knee so badly that blood was pouring out and she had to be brought to the hospital in an ambulance. Afterwards I kept having nightmares of the blood gushing out from her knee, and because I didn’t see her again until 2 years later, I seriously thought I had killed her. I lived in constant fear that the police would get me for killing my friend. When I finally did see her again, I thought she was a ghost. Of course she was really alive, and the accident wasn’t as bad as I thought it was.

8. When I was a kid, my best friend was Nina, a 4-year old who lived next door to us. We would play all the time, and do practically everything together. When she turned 7, she contracted meningitis. It was difficult watching her body bloat more and more over time because of all the medications and procedures. Though I didn’t know it at the time, my Mom told some years later that when the treatments were too painful for Nina, she would scream and call out my name and look for me. She died a year after getting sick, and in the video of her funeral, they played a recording of her singing her favorite song, “Somewhere Out There”, the theme to American Tail. That song is still too painful for me to hear.

9. While my family and I were on a trip to Disneyland, I got lost in the park. I was around 7, and I remember thinking about all the pictures I had seen on buses and milk cartons of kids who got lost and were never to be seen again. I was convinced that I would get kidnapped and have to live with new parents. I went into a souvenir shop, and while I was crying I asked an old lady to help me find my Mama. We didn’t really have to look that far, because a few minutes later my Mom came running into the souvenir shop and hugged me. Since then, I’ve always been nice to old ladies. In school, I’d always be the favorite student of old-maid terror professors, and I even spent some time in college regularly visiting a comfort woman from WWII who had the same birthday as me.

10. I realized I was gay when I was 5 years old. When I was 5 I had a wet dream about being naked with my cute boy classmates, and I remember I also had a hot, bad-boy-looking, muscular bus driver with a gold tooth who I fantasized about a lot. When I was 10 years old I became bisexual. I say bisexual because I would have non-sexual crushes on girls and imagine having torrid sex with men. I fell in love with a girl before I fell in love with a guy. There was this one time when I had a crush on a girl classmate in high school, and I remember that the reason I stopped having a crush on her was because I ended up liked her boyfriend more. I stopped liking girls altogether when I fell in love with a boy for the first time. I haven’t had a crush on a girl since I was 14.

11. I was 7 years old when my cousin molested me. My family was visiting the province, and in the mornings everyone would leave the house I was still asleep in and go to another relative’s house. I would be scared when I woke up, and my cousin would be the first person I’d see. I didn’t really think anything of it until I was 14 and I saw an episode of Oprah where the guest was saying how some kids don’t realize they’ve been molested because they felt good when it happened and I could relate. That episode of Oprah messed me up, and for a while I really hated my cousin. In college I had to move in with him (we were both living with an aunt), and in some ways I think he tried to make up for what he did to me. I lived in the same house with him up until last year, and although I had forgiven him a long time ago, sometimes when we argued I really had to resist the urge to say well fuck you you abused me when I was kid.

12. When I was around 13 my Dad lost his job and he spent several years without work. Since my family didn’t have as much income anymore, we moved to a smaller house, I moved to a cheaper school, and eventually we moved back to the Philippines. For whatever reason, I became terrified that eventually we wouldn’t have enough to eat. To make sure that my family wouldn’t go hungry, I started eating less. I would eat vegetables more than meat because I thought they were less expensive, and at meals I wouldn’t even start eating until I was sure that everyone had already finished eating first. Naturally I lost a lot of weight, and my Dad of all people was giving me a lot of crap because he thought I had an eating disorder. I never told him, and I don’t think I ever will, that if he hadn’t lost his job I would never have felt the need to eat less. I also never appreciated people calling me too thin back then because they had no idea that the reason why I didn’t want to eat was so that my family wouldn’t go hungry.

13. The first time I successfully seduced a man was when I was 13. We were about to move to the Philippines, and we were selling the stuff in our apartment in Bahrain. Even back then I didn’t really wear a lot at home, and on that day I was wearing a really long t-shirt, underwear, and nothing else. An Arab guy came into the apartment to look at the stuff we were selling, and at the time I was lying on the couch with my legs spread apart. Naturally, the guy ended up staring at me. He bought some stuff and my Dad asked me to help bring the stuff down to the guy’s car. Over the next few days he would come back and buy more stuff, and we would talk in the elevator while I helped him bring the stuff he bought to his car. I found out that he was in his 30s, that he was married and had 2 kids. I remember vividly the sticky look he would give me, the kind that guys give you when they’re lusting after you. On the day before we left Bahrain, the guy asked if we could meet sometime and go out. I chickened out and said no. I sometimes think that my parents splitting up is my karma for flirting with a married guy.

14. My parents never really liked my friends from Bahrain, because they always thought non-Filipino kids had loose morals. They thought my friends were a bad influence on me (and my Dad called me arrogant a lot and my Mom at one point accused me of being a drug user) and couldn’t wait until we got back to the Philippines so the conservative values of the Filipino kids could rub off on me. When we got back to the Philippines, they enrolled me in Jesu-Marie High School. In my first week (I entered the school in my Junior year), I attended a class meeting at a classmate’s house where practically everyone smoked (everyone was underaged). In my succeeding Senior year, I had a classmate get busted for selling drugs to younger students, I had 4 classmates either get pregnant or get someone pregnant (one of the guys had his girlfriend get an abortion), and the Principal (a seminarian) was blackmailing the hot guy students into having sex with him. We were a high school of only 200 students. So much for conservative Philippine values.

15. I have always loved writing letters. When I moved to the Philippines, I left behind my best friend, Rasika, in Bahrain. There was no e-mail at the time, and postage stamps were expensive, so I had to make do with sending her letters through friends that were coming home to the Philippines from Bahrain. I would write to her everyday, and it was almost like I was sending her my personal diary. The longest letter I sent her was over 300 pages long I think, and to make the letter more interactive I put in a box with lots of gifts, stuff that I had painted, and I even added a small booklet that was supposed to be a guide to everything that was part of the letter. In turn, Rasika did the same, and she sent me books of stuff she had written, stuff she cross-stitched, etc. One time I thought my Mom had accidentally thrown out the stuff that Rasika had sent me, and I cried so much that I was depressed for a few weeks. I eventually found the letters I thought my Mom had thrown away, but it took me over 3 years to find out where they had gone.

16. When I was 14, my parents made me attend a Youth For Christ retreat. At the same time, they were going through a Couples For Christ retreat. By the end of the session, your parents had to ask you if you wanted to commit to attending YFC full-time, and even though my Mom was crying and my Dad was all emotional, I told them I didn’t. I said that I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be Christian, and that I was thinking about converting to Hinduism. I was serious at the time. My best friend was Hindu, and during mass I would imagine Hindu gods at the altar instead of Jesus on the cross. My Dad resorted to offering to bribing me with an increased allowance if I would join YFC, but of course I didn’t give in. My parents have since allowed me to be more free with my spiritual beliefs. We had a conversation once where I told them that if I died before they did, I didn’t want a mass and I didn’t want a priest blessing my dead body. They just laughed. Still, every now and then when I go to Lucena I go to church just to make my Mom happy.

17. I don’t usually talk about my religious/spiritual beliefs, because I find it tiring to explain everything I believe in. Ultimately, I don’t think it matters what you believe in spiritually. What matters is how your spiritual beliefs shape your life, and so far I think I’ve lived my life pretty well. Still, for those interested, I’ve labeled myself everything from non-Catholic Christian to Buddhist to atheist to agnostic to pantheist to panentheist to spiritual-but-not-religious etc. The closest thing I have to a Bible is the “Conversations with God” series. I live by every word in those books, and even managed to convert a few friends to the non-religion.

18. I’ve always had the gift of knowing if romantic couples would last or not just by looking at their picture together. I remember when I was 11 I looked at a picture of my Mom and Dad and I found it odd that I was thinking they wouldn’t last together. True enough, when I was 15 they separated because my Mom accused my Dad of sleeping with our 16-year old maid. He claims he never did, though I do remember seeing my Dad climbing into the closet one time because our maid was crying inside there. I was so angry at my Dad, and I vowed not to cry over him after my Mom made him leave. Several years later, after I graduated from college, I was shocked to see my Mom and Dad hugging each other on our coach at home. They had gotten back together after my Dad helped my Mom get out of a financial mess, and part of the reason I was shocked was because the last time I saw them together they weren’t even on speaking terms. That night I had a dream that my Dad was leaving us again, and I woke up crying. The first time I cried over my parents separating was the day I saw that they were back together again.

19. After my Mom and Dad got back together, they had sex a lot. How do I know? Because one time in the middle of the night I heard my Mom whispering to my Dad “Shh! Hoy sandali di pa sila tulog!” and my Dad replied “Tulog na sila!”. Then my Dad proceeded to describe in graphic detail what he wanted to do with my Mom while I lay in my bed mortified at the thought of being awake while my parents had sex. After that incident, I realized I inherited some of my sexual tendencies from my parents: I got my exhibitionist tendencies from my Dad and my fetish for pain from my Mom. I hope this entry gets you to start thinking about what sex-related traits you might have gotten from your parents. ;-p

20. I lost my virginity because of a bet. I was already working at PeopleSupport at the time, and I was teammates with Lod and Marc. Lod hadn’t been in a relationship in a long time, and Marc was also still a virgin. We made a bet that whoever would be the last one to get into a relationship or get laid would have to treat the other 2 guys out to dinner. We made the bet on a Tuesday. By that Thursday I lost my virginity. I lost my virginity on May 22, 2003. I still use that date sometimes as my password for non-essential logins (Facebook is essential, therefore that’s not my password here hehehe).

21. The guy I lost my virginity to ended up being my first boyfriend. Though he was just supposed to be a one-night stand, we ended up seeing each other a lot (not just to sleep with each other). I fell in love with him after he cried while telling me the story of his family. He was everything I wanted in a man. I still think that he is my soulmate, and that we just met each other too soon. Just recently he tried to get back together with me, telling me he was wrong to leave me and that he realizes too that we were meant to be together. I told him I wasn’t ready to be in a relationship, and probably wouldn’t be ready for a while. He indirectly threatened to kill himself. We haven’t communicated with each other since.

22. While trying to get over my first boyfriend, I met Vince. We were going out, but it was nothing serious, and I never thought it would be anything serious because it seemed like we were heading towards friendship. I wanted something serious though, so I asked the Universe for a sign that would show me who my next boyfriend would be. I told myself that the next guy who would sing to me would be my next boyfriend. While we were out on a trip to Manila, Vince and I were talking about our favorite songs and he sang something to me. I didn’t think anything of it at first, and it was only the day after that I realized that hey someone sang to me. While I was wondering if that was the sign, Snoop Dogg and Justin Timberlake’s song “Signs” played on MTV — twice in a row. MTV never makes a technical error like playing songs twice consecutively, so I took that as another sign. Still, I was not satisfied, so I asked for one last sign. I soon found out that Vince’s birth name was Raffy, the same name as the first boy I ever fell in love with. In college, a fortune teller told me that the first boy I ever loved would come back to me. I realized that perhaps what she meant was that someone with the same name would come back to me, and he did. Vince became my boyfriend a few weeks after the signs all came together.

23. Sometimes you hear about couples who break up after they go through highly traumatic situations together, like couples who break up after one of them goes through a cancer battle, after they have a kid who dies, stuff like that. Without going into too much detail (since it’s all in my blog anyway), I think that’s the reason Vince and I broke up too. We went through a very difficult period together, and seeing each other reminded us too much of the stuff we went through. The only difference between me and him is that he gave up first. We started meeting each other again last year to resolve the stuff we left unfinished, and although I’ve sort of forgiven him for leaving me for someone else (even after everything I went through for him), every now and I then I still get so pissed off at him when I remember what an asshole he was when we were together. I tell him at least once a month that I never want to see him again. He is an addiction that I’m still trying to overcome.

24. I’m generally very secretive. Yes, I’m talkative and noisy, but I generally won’t share anything going on in my private life because a lot of it isn’t the kind of stuff that comes up in everyday conversation. Most of my closest friends hate how I never really tell them anything, and sometimes it takes months before they find out that something has happened to me. Part of the reason I don’t talk about my private life is because most people don’t ask me about it. I usually assume that if you don’t ask me about it, it means that you’re not interested in talking about it. Also, I prefer going through and solving my problems on my own. I don’t like talking through things. It doesn’t help me to find out how people would do stuff if they were in my situation.

25. This post took me over 2 days to write. I had to pause in between because some of the entries were harder to write than I thought they would be. I really didn’t plan for this note to be melodramatic. I just wanted to write about stuff I remembered and stuff that I’m not sure everyone knows about. Some entries I wrote, deleted, and put back in. While I think that some entries will make some people think I’m crazy (which I am), my true friends will understand and not judge me. I think I’ll end up tagging more than 25 people to this note (if that’s possible), which means I won’t be sticking to the rules, but in case you’re not tagged cuz of the tagging limit or whatever, please don’t get offended. I didn’t intentionally mean to leave anyone out. 🙂