Everyday
at around 2 PM, you can find me driving up Katipunan Avenue in my red
Civic heading southbound on my way to work. This is the route I take
every afternoon and it’s delightfully predictable. Thanks to the major
colleges situated along Katipunan, traffic gets considerably thick
during this hour but it usually inches along at 40kph or so and it gets
me where I’m going in time. What I usually do is hop into the right
lane, speed past Ateneo up the flyover, put the can of mountain dew I’m
taking a swig at on the beverage holder below the dash and settle in
for the laid-back five minute drive to the Boni-Katipunan intersection.
This is one particular routine of my day that I absolutely love.

When I’ve had ample
sleep, I usually remember five things that slipped my mind the day
before and I’ll usually end up with about ten ideas for things I want
to write. Now this may sound hokey, but I really look forward to these
fifteen minutes of traffic because aside from the infrequent
distraction offered by messages sent to my phone by my mobile carrier
(Enjoy UNLIMITED 10 min. VOICE CALLS fr 11pm-6am for 7 days! Simply
register to the 258 Call Reload promo!), it buys me time to gather up
pieces of my brain, which is usually sprawled all over the place,
before I face another day of corporate plodding.

Anyway, today I was
driving along, lost in dreamy thoughts involving a mutant chick with
three grotesquely disfigured arms, a cucumber and my ass. I’m also
listening to No Doubt’s album ‘The singles 1992-2003′ while maintaining
a safe distance between my car and the car ahead of me when all of a
sudden, I caught a glimpse of an SUV in my rear view mirror. The
fucking idiot was changing lanes like he had an urgently huge turd up
his ass that badly needed to clog a toilet. He was moving up the road,
overtaking five cars at a time in a way that anybody could see was
getting him nowhere. He weaved in and out of the lane a couple of more
times and to my surprise, he was now right behind me, trailing my
bumper with only a few inches to spare.

I wasn’t surprised when
I looked back in my rear view mirror to find out that the mentally
defective jerk who was driving the SUV was actually a jerkette.
She’s one of those kikay college girl types which makes her all the
more dangerous. She’s the type of girl whose numerous exposure to
designer-drug inducing parties and horrible trance music has left her
sphere of attention confined to whatever is going on in her severely
damaged brain. I mean, the fact that she didn’t pay for her own car or
let alone, its insurance doubles the belligerence of her driving. If
she totals daddy’s limited edition Ford Expedition into a lamp post,
she can just waltz her way into a showroom and get a new one on her
Platinum Visa credit card.

One thing you have to know about me is that I sweat like a
motherfucker. I mean there are people who sweat in the “sporadic drops of sweat
in the forehead” sense, but when I say I sweat, I mean it in the “Oh my god!
That guy’s shirt is drenched! I bet he has dark underarms!” kind of way.

The cheap moisturizer I put on my face this morning didn’t
help my case either. You see, I had to barrel to the office today to get my
paycheck and have it encashed in the bank before it closes at three
o’clock
in the afternoon. I got in the office sometime around 2:45
pm, got
my check and traipsed up Emerald Avenue to where Standard Chartered bank
is. It wasn’t a long walk actually; just something like half a block but if
typing this paragraph alone is enough to make me sweat like a bitch already,
you could just imagine the dank, sticky, moisturizer disaster of a snowflake I
managed to turn myself into. So Hortaleza, whoever you are, fuck you; I’m not
buying moisturizer from you ever again. Bitch

Being that I have been overweight since I was 3 months
old, I have learned to live with my exorbitantly profuse sweating. Exorbitantly
profuse? Isn’t that redundantly redundant? I digress. As I was saying, I have
lived with my sweating long enough for me to make it my friend. We take long
walks at the park together, frolic in fields of daisies together, molest ten
year old school boys together; that sort of thing. There are some instances though
when I want sweat to just leave me the fuck alone. One such instance is when I
have these close encounters with really attractive women.

Me and my colleague Pete
have been talking about ‘Helpful Comments’ people offer to you in galling
commiseration. You know when people say stuff like “Man, you’re going to fail this
course. Tsk tsk. An entire semester wasted.” After seeing your failing midterm
examination grade? That’s a ‘helpful comment.’ I don’t know if anybody else
realizes this but more often than not, attractive women have a strong
inclination to offering comments like these.