And Now For My Next Trick

It's been a year since I got engaged and we've done zero planning so far. Sure, I turned into a suburban housewife the moment I entered our apartment. That transformation, somehow, skipped the bride phase and the having a dream wedding bit.

I'll be honest: I never saw myself getting married, I really didn't. I cannot for the life of me remember considering marriage let alone imagining my own wedding. In college, we had Marriage and Theology as a subject. Yes, a whole three-unit subject dedicated on what it means to be Catholic and married. I did pretty badly. While most of the class had their wedding destinations and budgets ready, I could hardly name three kinds of flowers most commonly used in weddings. Suffice to say, I barely passed the subject. I was the only one who almost failed, actually.


In some way, I wish I wanted to get married. Planning a wedding and all the annoying little details like who's seated with whom makes me want to abandon the effort altogether. I still cannot identify wedding flowers, cuts of wedding gowns, nor could I comprehend the fact that we have to shell out thousands of pesos for seemingly simple things (kamusta naman ang make-up artist na 10k). There are tickets to be bought and suppliers to be booked. There are gowns to be chosen and photographers to reserve.



Maybe I don't get it.

Maybe I was one of the women who were born without a dream wedding in mind. From what I gather, weddings are supposed to be a celebration of a couple's commitnment to each other. Said couple would make their vows in front of their friends and family; it's about sharing an important milestone in the couple's life. It is because of this reason that I believe that such a beautiful poignant event could stand alone in itself without so much props or fireworks. I really don't understand why there is the need to smother everything with overworked details and trappings of motiffs and flowers.

Since moving to Sweden, I've spent some time getting to know myself a bit better. I've learned basic Swedish and can engage in small talk with a stranger in IKEA, I know how to walk in snow without falling every couple of meters, and I know that I could commit myself to lady-like tasks in the morning and pound a bottle of vodka (blueberry) at night.

My latest attempt at lady-like hobbies did not go as well as I thought it would. I tried my hand at crocheting. The stitches are simple enough and anyone who has ever survived Home Economics class could finish a granny cozy or a doily. Then came this hat pattern that claimed to:

Esmi te Bear and I went to Skanör and spent a week with his 95-year old grandmother. While the place as cozy as you would imagine, the only drawback was that the house smelled of mold; it being badly planned out aside from being ancient. Since we stayed for a week, the house's moldy scent clung on to our skin, hair, and basically onto every thing we brought with us to our house.

I have long hair, so you could imagine how badly it would smell with a week's worth of mold. In spite of the washing and the scalp-scrubbing, the scent would never leave my hair during our stay there.

Today, thankfully, I got the scent away! I was really scared that I would go to school smelling eau de geriatric. To anyone who gets in the same predicament as I did, here's how to remove the smell of must and mold from your hair.

Hair:

1. Mix about 1 tablespoon of vinegar with a basin of water.
2. Soak hair in water.
3. Rinse hair with the vinegar solution and lather. Leave in hair for about three minutes.
4. Wash out the solution with a lot of cold water. Your hair may smell faintly of pickles but it will shine like the sun thanks to the vinegar's cleansing components.

Good news: my hair smells tons better now. Bad news: I really REALLY want chicken pork adobo. NAO.

Imagine a roomful of people who have at least 9 languages in between them. Now, less than a fourth of them have a smidgen of basic skills. How do you teach this group a new language knowing that there is no unifying language to help them learn new words?

A week into the Swedish course and I've understood a bit more Swedish than I did from watching TV or trying to listen to conversations. While the class still has a heavy cloud of confusion and shyness hanging over us every single day, we're starting to break from our hesitations and fear of speaking in public whilst mangling a language. It's a bit comforting to be in a room with people who share the same mixture of emotions every time a teacher asks you a question you probably half understand.

One of my classmates is Qing Qing, a Chinese girl who loves to laugh and has a bit of a problem with the letter R and L. Grouped with her, a fellow Pinay, and another girl from Iraq, we've been struggling to get our Å's, Ä's, and Ö's right. For Qing Qing, saying the letter R has proven to be one of the most difficult parts of this week's lessons.

Lulubelle's group: Ehrrrrrrr....
Qing Wing: Elllllllllll....
(and the scene goes one)

Another problem that she had was the difference of the Roman calendar and the Chinese lunar calendar.

Lärare (teacher): Vilken månad är du född? (Which month were you born?)
Qing Qing: Jag är född i may. (I was born in May.)
Lärare: Nej.
Qing Qing: Nej?!
Lärare holds up class record
Lärare: Du är född i october. (You were born in October.)

Even though everyone in the class laughed. Qing Qing knew that we weren't laughing at her exactly. It was just nice to know mistakes will be met with good-natured laughter instead of one that scoffs and mocks the other person.

**

We went on a field trip on Wednesday. On the bus, our Thai classmates asked another Asian girl from the school if she was also from Thailand. The girl said she was from the Philippines so our classmates pointed to me and the other Pinay and said we were also from there. This girl then gives us the evil eye, rolls her eyes, and deliberately avoids us kababayans the rest of the trip.

Wow.

This will be my last weekend as a total bum. On Monday, I will start attending Svenskundervisning för invandrare (SFI), which basically is a class for adults who want to learn Swedish. Excited as I was to actually start doing something instead of just trying to think of how to spend the day, I never really gone into lengths to prepare myself for studying Swedish.


After signing up for classes about two months ago, the people who worked at SFI gave me links and websites to help me learn a bit of Swedish while waiting for actual lessons to start. The websites included one that actually had modules for learning words while the other sites led to radio and television programs in Swedish. Days of procrastination turned into weeks and then into a month. Before I knew it, only a couple of modules were visited while a handful of words and phrases have been learned. As it turns out, I liked learning better through experience and application rather than trying to memorize things and then groping at these words later when I need them.


How does one learn a language exactly? Does it involve memorization of words, grammar rules, and spelling? Or does one learn from immersing oneself in one's new environment, ears perked to listen and pick up words which would be used during a similar context or situation later in the week? Do you remember how you learned words when you were a child? 


Words and their meanings have probably been learned through both memory and application. As a child, when you see a thing with four wooden legs, a seat, and a backrest, you associate it with feeding, sitting, and generally just hanging out in the living room: chair. With the number of meals you had daily, you learn that this 'chair' could be found in the kitchen, the living room, or any other place where there could be place to sit. Words are learned through function, meaning, and context. How then, does one learn a language with pre-existing concepts and definitions of things?

***


Yesterday, at a store, a lady apologized to me for moving a rack of sunglasses while I was still browsing through them. While my really basic Swedish is fine, my grasp of three extra vowels (å, ä. and ö) are horrible at best. So goes the scene:


Lady: Oj, förlåt! (Oh, sorry!)
Me: Ingerfära.
(The lady looks at me strangely,as I try to smile knowing that I might have done *something* to merit that look.)


I asked Esmi the Bear later what the proper reply to a stranger's apology was. Apparently, it was something else. Instead of saying 'it was nothing', I told the lady, 'ginger'. Now, I have learned that 'ingenfära' is 'ginger' while 'ingenfara' means 'that's nothing'.
 
As I learn more Swedish words, I know I'd get more confused and probably more (unintentionally) offensive as I practice speaking the language. I just hope I'd fare better than the guy who confused the Swedish words for 'comversation' and 'intercourse'.

It's been more than a month since I quit my job and a week already since I moved to Stockholm. While the prospect of doing nothing the whole day is appealing, having nothing to do for days on end lessens the attraction of being a bum. I've always had a job. Even before I graduated from college, I already started working. Thus, spending days lazing around the house trying to find some new chore to try gets a bit old after three days.

My last job was concentrated on writing content for a comedy website as well as writing stuff for their partner websites. There were a lot of fun if not interesting tasks, but all these writing tasks are dominated by one topic: colon cleansing. As a writer/SEO/editorial coordinator/marketing assistant of said client, I had to handle their partner's blog, contents of which focused on ways old and new to dislodge particles from one's colon. So to speak, I've dealt with shit for a good three years of my career. In a heartbeat, I could tell how to clean your colon, which foods are colon-friendly, and basically say a lot of bullshit about how colon cleansing could help you get healthy and lose weight.



With that assignment, I started getting paranoid about my daily toilet habits. Indeed, with a wide understanding of poo color and consistency, I unwillingly formed a habit of observing my own poo. For the life of me, I cannot CANNOT do number 2 in a public place (doing number two in public is a skill, I believe and view with admiration and longing). For me to do my business, things have to be just right and the planets need to be properly aligned. I need to hear running water while doing my business and it has to be completely silent. Once someone's talking outside the toilet, my poo just shies away and burrows itself, just like what happens when I warn people about the dangers of impacted feces.
Hopefully, I would lose the habit of over analyzing shit. Maybe one day, I will poo my heart out without caring if there is a conference happening just outside my comfort room. And maybe, maybe, my next job won't mean I have to deal with shit or any kind of excrement.

And we're back.

The past month was just a cycle of events that went from almost dying from the heat, to taking care of my nephew to meeting up with friends for goodbye-until-later meetups. As most of you know, the full scope and enormity of the fact that I am moving countries, nay, continents has not been really the easiest thing to digest nor fully comprehend. Up until now, it hasn't really sunk in yet. I honestly don't know when that realization will come. Indeed, how does one get to wrestle with all the emotions that come with leaving one's country when I've lived in stockholm for 3 months?

One of my best friends, Aspiring Theater Superstar, has pointed out, it would be a whole lot better if I focused on the good things that are coming to me instead of wringing my hands because of what-if's and things that aren't existing. I took that advice to heart and added a dash of adik to it. I didn't even worry about the fact that I haven't packed 3 days before I was leaving (a fact that my high school friends panicked about) while I enjoyed the company of friends the last week I was staying in Manila.

Honestly, it doesn't feel like I lost anything from moving continents. Now that everyone else is moving on with their lives, this feels like the start of my own new chapter. While others had coming weddings, new relationships, and new careers to handle, I've got my new life waiting for me in another continent. While I, too, have a wedding, a new career, and a new home waiting for me, I'm honestly not scared of all these things. Maybe I've become more mature, a bit more emotionally stable, or maybe I've found someone who'd help calm all my storms, but I am at my happiest. Now who, even the most adik, would be scared of that?