ulanmaya's 2k5 south east asian games hehehe... here's another request. yay! i like requests. it's like someone's making song requests. parokya ni edgar did that a lot... *swoon.* hehehehe. these requests might look like just something for me to do, but ulanmaya is all too eager to speak. ahahaha. sorry this is a whole week late, ahaha.

[ official web site of the 2005 south east asian games ]

a few years ago, high school batchmates and i started chatting online. we can't see each others' faces, so we invented many expressions to communicate emotion. one such (overused) emotion that night is disbelief. i told them what had finally happened to me all this time and where i had managed to find a stable job nowadays, and one of them interjected, "wushu!" i had since adopted this term for my own use, and had employed it liberally since then to express teasing disbelief. i've used it so liberally, i have no idea now in which context. i swear, i didn't know it was an esteemed asian sport, with sharp weapons, no less. :blushes: my bad. heehee!

one of the things that young filipinos here in chicago like to do to make sure they're doing all that they can to learn as much about philippine culture is to learn sports developed especially in the homeland. one of these sports is arnis. the first time i've heard of this sport was in third grade, and i wasn't allowed anywhere near those two sticks, even though i recognized them as sticks. i wasn't totally obtuse, excuse me, if you weild them the wrong way, i know they'll hurt. but of course none of my cousins listened to me. so when our physical education teacher gave us a demonstration, i stood as far as i could from his flying tricks. later, here in chicago, i would see salons open that offer classes in arnis, but because of the cold and the warning when i was little, i didn't take lessons. it was expensive, and i had already accepted my fate as a klutz. later, by the time i developed a rebellious, "i'm filipina and i can do this, dammit!" attitude, my work schedule had shifted to nightside. so each weekend afternoon for almost the entire summer past, i edited video of my friends taking lessons in arnis. there totally is no substitute for actual practice - or redeeming qualities in bitterness. sigh.

chicago has a lake and a river, and there is a rowing team at my school. there are also several community dragon boat racing teams around the city. friends continue to dare each other to row the chicago river, whose waters become, um, a little shiny and thick around where we live, on the northside of the city. hehehe. the river snakes under several main bridges - irving park road, montrose, lawrence avenue, hugs the side of von steuben high school and continues outbound to lake michigan via downtown chicago. as part of a credited service activity, my sister spent a saturday fishing debries out of the branch of the river near her school, von steuben. she fished out plastic wrappers, candy wrappers, glass bottles, aluminum cans, rags, clumps of hair, blocks of leaves, webs of tree branches, rods of steel, an old car tire. they stopped after they found the tire. in the river downtown, you row with skyscrapers looking down on you. sometimes you actually see office workers wave to you from their windows. they mean well, but they look like expressionless mannequins with arms, and you worry a bit. in the summer, the city raises its drawbridges one at a time to let you and your fellow boaters pass, the yatchs and the tourboats, the kayaks and the regular rowboaters. there's no way your head could still get caught in the lowering steel and metal, but you worry still; pigeons roost under those bridges. and the last thing you'd want to do - trust me - is dip your hand into the river to wash whatever muck off. you'd at least want to do that in lake michigan. but even then, you might want to take a shower after. hehe.

ahh, archery! legolas. the elves' specialty. cupid with business emo. ancient wartime machine gun long range firing squad. the most elegant of sports. not sure if the field set up next to a highway near our old house is still in use. they built it in the middle of the first SEAGames that i could remember, in quezon city. but i guess that field isn't in use anymore, ahaha. archery is the coolest of sports because it is also the meaning of my first name. ;-)  ¶ 12/04/2005 03:05:00 AM