So there was a fire at our apartment building today. It was 6:30 in the morning: D and I were dressed for work, and I was just about to partake of a nutricious and delicious bowl of oatmeal, when we suddenly heard all this hullaballoo from upstairs. Lots of screeching and bellowing and heavy objects crashing to the floor. We thought it was just some old married couple getting all pissed and married at each other, so we rushed outside because we’re so, like, usisero y’know.
But the guy hurtling down the stairs was screaming ‘fire,’ and we saw the rest of our neighbors running out of their apartments with all their stuff. I was scared, but it was more of an unnerved, weak-kneed kind of fright since we still couldn’t see anything ablaze.
D and I rushed back in to grab our prized possessions. We first scuttled around plucking out what was most crucial to us. That hypothetical question/ice breaker “If your house was on fire, what would you save?” just hung over my head the whole time, and I couldn’t believe it was being asked of me for real. I more or less grabbed what I always thought I would:
1) laptop, iPod, cellphone
2) wallet, passport, other official documents
3) my copy of Perks of Being a Wallflower
4) my signed copy of Circles of Life, Imelda Marcos’s batshit-crazy guidebook on how to live your life batshit-crazy (ibebenta ko kasi ito sa eBay pag desperado na)
We then got as much of our other stuff once the valuables were out of the way: the DVD player, the TV, clothes and shoes. This stuff ended up dumped on the sidewalk facing our building, and we spent the next hour or so with the rest of our neighbors in our little compound, all of us pacing the street with that same sullen, watdafaaakkk look.
We found out that the fire started in the apartment directly above ours. A short-circuit or something. The room was cooking bad — windows popping to pieces, bright orange flames shooting out. We lucked out by living on the first floor since we got to evacuate fairly easily, but the downside was that, once all the firetrucks came, all the water used seeped into our apartment, ruining some of our books (D is very much in mourning as I type) and basically turning our place into a kiddie pool. Kinarma kami sa Ondoy.
We’re fine now. It’ll take about a week ’til we can move back; the electricity’s kaput and much of the upper floors need fixing. But we’re fine. And I guess we won’t be too much of a stranger to our neighbors anymore, even though we’ve only started living there 2 months ago. They’ve seen D fling a plastic bag of my underwear to the side of the road. They’ve seen me slumped by the road against a pile of books, hair still wet from the bath, weepy.
Just last night, we were sitting in bed, eating dinner with our brand-new set of pretty plates and bowls c/o Shopwise, watching E! News and formally acknowledging our happiness. I mean, I know we still are, but hot-damn, Powers that Be, your sense of humor is WHACK.

I think D and I win the Philippines’ Biggest Morons award for our total unawareness of last Saturday’s horrors. We had acknowledged that it had been raining scary-hard nonstop, so much so that no daylight was coming in our windows, and decided we would just have to stay indoors, diminishing supply of food and DVDs be damned. But we still had no idea apocalypse was on-going most everywhere else.
Oh my god, I could cry.
I was a huge Oasis fan. HUGE. I had a day of the year dedicated to them (Margie’s Annual Oasis Day, April 13); my youngest brother is named Liam on my insistence and, via headphones, was subject to their discography from the womb; I would gaud myself to become emotionally invested in boys with at least two full Oasis albums to their name or could list non-singles down by memory; and the world would end for me whenever the Brothers Gallagher would announce a split, which was fairly often. I was a tubby, upper-middle-class Asian girl who was never let out on the street and I loved their proletarian Britrock to pieces.
*hold breath and…GO*
To cap off my very first month at what is becoming more and more apparently my first legitimate job, I made it through yesterday’s Very Big Event to present Very Big Hospital’s Very Important Program alive. I started my job just in time for Very Big Event’s Very Many Writing Tasks, so it really felt fitting to celebrate my 30th day of work literally running around the hospital at my boss’s every bark amidst Very Important People doing and saying Very Important Things in Very Fancy Surroundings.