chasing liberty

i stay in a dormitory in a university in the Philippines. as a bonus to paying for the lodging and dorm facilities, you get to have fresh air(it's a forest out there, lotsa trees), a huge variety of insects nesting in your room(told ya we're jurassic), AND roommates for FREE.

i have this roommate who hasn't had enough of all the things he can get for free while sharing the same privileges as everyone else. he adds to his own set of freebies the act of secretly using my mobile phone as i helplessly lay in slumber passing the night away.

his first slip was when i unexpectedly(i bet it was for him) woke up in the midst of a bad dream, getting a glimpse of him replacing my phone on my bed as deftly as a seasoned reverse engineer.(or so i think) i took it for just checking out my phone since i wouldn't take him for someone who sneaks up on people.

but then another incident changed whatever innocence i thought of him. my cellphone(or rather my gf's, since we happen to switch phones occasionally) has this feature that automatically saves items that are sent as text messages. lucky me(unlucky him), his ignorance left my phone his mark on the SENT ITEMS box. learning about this, i almost got furious. i later told myself to keep my cool and see if he's gonna talk(on his own) or not.

days after, he even borrowed my phone one afternoon without so much as a word about his midnight projects. i'll be damned if he ever will.

Arvin even calls me casper, as describes a ghostly figure who comes and goes unnoticed, according to him. this so happened because for the past semester i rarely spent nights in school. it probably frustrated him for not getting the most out of his privileges. *grins*

one day, the LCD of "my" phone did not survive a fall. i'm lucky enough to know that the phone itself is still working minus the apparent advantages of a crystal display. hence, i still bring it to school only to make and receive voice calls.

i thought about seeing a look of disappointment on his face when he discovers he can't use my phone anymore, should another attempt take place.

it was just today that i awakened at dawn to find him jolted at seeing me stare at his hand firmly gripping my phone in another one of his clandestine operations.

i was sure i got him off on the onset because i woke up with the snapping-off of the headseat attached to my phone. he was just pulling it off my bed. in addition to my luck, he's just plain stupid not to carry out his plans perfectly. but my luck seems to cancel out as i let him slip off to class and let myself doze off again for not knowing what to do with him for the time being.

i'm not great with punishments when i'm not raging mad, but then i'd hate to see the consequences whenever i do get out of control. i'm more like 'bruce banner' in a way. but i wouldn't endorse "hulk" as a not-to-miss flick. it made me think twice on spending a hundred bucks seeing marvel on wide screen. it was a blessing i saw it on VCD.

anyways, i do have grim thoughts about how to deal with this guy, but it should be my last resort.

anyone for a penny?

going home

It was always a cool and windy jeepney ride home after having left my girl's place on late evenings, almost everyday during my measly two-week semestral break from school.

I haven't slept yet, not that there's any serious or funny reason, and it's already 6:14AM peeking at me from the computer's clock. But mystery keeps welling up as the exact same thing murders my attention everytime I pass Pedro Gil Avenue in Manila.

I keep seeing them..

The (assumed)mother, sitting by the pavement alongside her (supposed)son, leaning with their backs at a closed pull-down metal gate of a day-store, looking sometimes as if they were gravely discussing the day's events, and how they fared, before they went to sleep.

I mentioned "sometimes" because there were also those usual instances when my sight only hovered over two figures sleeping the day's exhaustion away.(or probably embracing the fruits of the previous day's harvest of life)

Whichever or whatever it was, I still couldn't help wondering.

The mother was about the age of within 40-50, and the boy i think was somewhere in his early teens. They didn't look all slovenly from where i sat(at a moving jeepney running 40km/h), and it doesn't escape my notice that they didn't have any personal belongings with them(as far as i can remember seeing).

I kept pondering about how and why they had come to arrive in such a precarious and mysterious condition.

I seldom fail to notice them everytime i pass the place beyond 11pm.
The mystery still baffles me, but now sleep is eating me up.