It's my first time to smoke a cigarette in forty-eight hours and my head spins in a momentary vertigo. The dreadful forty-eight hours. In Delgado Memorial Hospital.

Sister B gave birth to a healthy 51-centimeter, 7-pound and 4-ounces baby boy archaically named Jose Lorenzo whom my niece nicknamed as Muymuy; healthy, that, having no missing or extra fingers, no third eye, no apparent sign of physical abnormality, except for a superfluous skin protruding at his right tragus, the small cartilaginous flap in front of the external opening of the ear. Muymuy looks like his sister Sandy, sharing the same prominently large noseholes which they acquired from their large-noseholed father, whom we shall call Bayaw B. After reading parts of Sister B's book Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn: The Complete Guide by Penny Simkin, I was expecting the conception of Muymuy a celebratory hijinks with fireworks, loud party music, and a smorgasbord of kiddie food--the exact opposite picture of a funeral. But the initial reaction of everybody was similar to welcoming a new pet turtle in the house.

The Hospital Room. Rather, the hospital ward. There were no private rooms available for two whole effing days so we were forced to stay in an unremarkable four-patient hospital ward of the gloomiest sort: gray-walled, squattish, squarish, unfenestrated, bathroomless, and divided into four quadrants by intersecting gray curtains. The aisle facing the door bisects this three-dimensional box, separating two quadrants from the other two, reading clockwise from the door Quadrant A, Quadrant B, Quadrant D, and Quadrant C. We were on Quadrant B, the corner with the frosty air-conditioning. Each quadrant is composed of one lumpy hospital bed that sunk at the center, one rusty metal table, and one white monobloc chair for the watcher. It was so cramped you'd have to walk sideways to get on the bed. Outside the room, the hospital's color scheme resembles the spectral hues of human shit, from light yellow to dark brown. I was the all-around alalay for two whole days, running errands to the nurses' station, the nursery, the drugstore, the gotohan, the concierge, the billing department, and just about everywhere my immobile Sister B commanded me to go. I have memorized the hospital's architecture, the fire exits, the shortcuts, the hidden restrooms, the storerooms, and lastly, the stairways and cabinet rooms which I mentally noted as Quickie Vicinities.

The thing about hospital rooms is that every single billing detail is dependent on it. The cheaper the room, the cheaper the syringe, the cottonball, the doctor's fee. And given the economic status of our deplorable hospital room, the services we received were far from satisfactory: the food tastes like laundry, dunderheaded nurses take about a lifetime to resolve our complaints, the common bathroom was filthy and slippery, Muymuy couldn't be wheeled in (Sister B had to be wheeled into the breastfeeding room instead), ergo, friends and relatives were discouraged to visit. Once in my nocturnal wandering mood when Sister B was snoring asleep, I was able to peek into a private room at the second floor facing the balcony. It was cozy inside with thick dark-red carpet, its own sink, refrigerator, bathroom, television, leather bench, plush bed, dark curtains, all about resembling not a hospital room but a hotel unit. It was a far cry from our reprehensible cramped quadrant, and in the tiny corner of my morbid imagination, I considered busting in armed with a hospital fork and a bread knife, taking everybody hostage and demanding the hospital management to swap their room with ours.

Two days I suffered mental retardation. I had no one to talk to, no book to read, no music to listen to. Thus, my sole hobby was studying the paintings that hung on the walls. First, the technical: I'd compulsively realign askew paintings the same way I'd recenter chess pieces on the checkered board. Next, I observed they were categorized into two: abstract art and flower paintings. Abstract paintings of meaningless squares filled the hallways of private rooms, while the flower paintings, that of the ward section. WHYYYY?? Is it because the squares and rectangles of those abstract paintings resemble the metropolis' buildings and skyscrapers, suitable for the upper-crusters of the society, while the flower paintings are rather appropriate for the idyllic, pastoral lower class? Hmmm?

When we had finally cleared our bills and our quadrant checked for missing hospital materials (pillow, bed sheet, etc.), Muymuy was brought to us from the nursery wrapped in a blue cloth, sucking one mittened hand. I couldn't conceive the idea of a new born human being as the opposite equivalent of losing a loved one. When my dad died, I was apathetic and unflinching; when my four nieces and nephews were born, I was similarly nonchalant and incurious.

So effing what if someone dies?
So effing what if someone's born?
Why are we to celebrate?
Why are we to mourn?

Teeeeeeeee.XD

It's prolly I can't quite warp myself into The Family Life, that, marrying a dude for the sole purpose of security and tax reductions, restricting your sex life with one partner until you die, seeing and feeling and fellating the same cock forever and ever, bearing a separate developing human being in your tummy, avoiding drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes, undergoing a laborious vagina-lacerating childbirth, becoming fat, unattractive, and momma-looking, and most importantly, attending to an infant in its every crying whim, and the whole responsibility of raising and nurturing a child. Perhaps it's because I'm an ingrate; I take my family for granted. Or maybe I'm just innately selfish, vainglorious, self-reliant, and polygamous. I have a wide range of pricks to pick from (Hayng! The yabangness!XD), whereas those who believe in monogamy and marriage are those who have limited choices of sexual partners, albeit, having no one at all and thus end up tolerating someone who can tolerate them in return. Or maybe it's because the married couples in my immediate family, that being my parents and my three sisters, all have fucked up married lives. And among the nine girls in my high school sorority, I am the remaining bachelorette; all them eight have been impregnated by asswipes, married these asswipes, and ended as she-asswipes themselves, raising asswipe children who will end up like them--asswipes.

I don't believe in marriage. Marriage is just a concept constructed by organized animals in a patriarchal (female-discriminating) society. It's just a piece of paper that gives the illusion of security, purpose, happiness, destiny, fate, immortality (by genes).

On our way to Sister B's house, we dropped by Mercury Drug and parked our middle-class Toyota next to a dark-gray expensive-looking Mitsubishi. I bought Sister B and Muymuy's medical paraphernalia, and upon opening the cardoor, slammed it against the door of the Mitsubishi, leaving a dimple that sky-dived my bank account to the negatives. I imagined the guy behind the tinted window the managerial type, a guy in a coat and tie, wearing a Rolex and a thick gold necklace. As Bayaw B backed the car, the Mitsubishi's door flung open, and out stepped a short-legged arthritic Chinese man wearing threadbare maong shorts and Beachwalk slippers. He stood there hands akimbo on his potbellied midsection, muttering and staring with his slit eyes at the dimple then at us then at the dimple then at us without much of a willpower to raise his voice or walk towards us. He just stood there inert, muttering and staring back and forth until we drove away. What is power?

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