the fable of the lost shoe

9 pm and a shoe
lays on the street
bathing in that sickly light of the night
forgotten and friendless
it must have fallen
from a passing car
or from someone's bag
but one thing's for sure
none have come back
to find it
the search not deemed worth the time

9 pm and a shoe
rests on the street
and it dreams
that the days before it was lost
still are:
that a foot still filled it with purpose
and another shoe just like it beside
to walk the waking world with

9 pm and a shoe
stirs on the street
as a man with a sack on his back
comes to find the shoe
and says, 'finally!
a pair for my other shoe'
he puts the shoe
into his sack
and takes it home
where the shoe awakes
to find its dream
come true in ways
it did not even dream of

*****

photo taken on my way home, at the cebu business park, cebu city

is my cat bulimic?

help! my cat miming has a problem. she's been vomiting the past 3 days. i caught her almost do it in my room 3 days ago, so i promptly threw her out. she then went ahead and threw up right outside the door. my mother also saw her do it in the kitchen the next day. she did it again yesterday, after we fed her dinner. clean up has been such a pain.

but i look at miming, and her appetite seems quite normal. she actually keeps meowing at me every time she sees me, to probably try and wheedle some food from me. then my internal hypochondriac suddenly gave me his diagnosis: miming is bulimic.

she seems to have lost weight the past few weeks, and looks rather thin. is miming depressed? is she insecure w/ her looks? does she think she has weight problems? does she think her perceived weight problems are driving away perspective boyfriends, i mean, tomcats? are the lady cats in the neighborhood teasing her that she's fat? has she been watching too much TV when the humans of the house are away, which has somehow influenced her definition of what it is to be beautiful? does she need to see a shrink? do i need to see a shrink?

i've been meaning to ask her all that, but all she says is 'meow'.

a quarter of a century, or, my attempts at spaceflight

i am now a quarter of a century old. aside from wondering where all the days have gone, i haven't quite decided yet if i should be happy or sad, or if i should give a fart about it. i'm not even sure if it's something worth remembering.

to mark the event, i bought a tub of ice cream, to add something a little fancy for dinner at home. but just family, no guests. no party, no pizza for the officemates, no night out drinking w/ buddies. a quarter century of existence has turned me into a grinch.

the morning of my birthday, curiosity struck me with a question: had there ever been anything important that occurred on my birthday? so while i struggled against insignificance, i did some research; i logged on to wikipedia.

from what i read, it seems i share the splendid company of movie stars on my birthday: charlton heston in 1924, buster keaton in 1895, susan sarandon in 1946, alicia silverstone in 1976, and rachael leigh cook in 1979. some writers too: anne rice in 1941 and alvin toffler in 1928. even an american president (rutherford hayes, 1822), a cartoon dog (snoopy, 1950), and a comic strip detective (dick tracy, 1931). not bad.

and on the 4th of october, 50 years ago, a 184 pound aluminum sphere called sputnik (russian for traveller) blasted into the skies on a soviet R-7 ballistic missile, becoming the first man-made satellite to orbit the earth. and so the space age began. nice.

then on the 4th of october, 25 years ago, a 6.13 pound baby boy came crashing into earth, me. but unlike sputnik, i've never really gotten off the ground. for all my dreaming and scheming, i, the eternal underachiever, haven't taken off yet. i'm still on earth, stuck in the same old life, the same old job, same old me. it's kinda tough, to be in the shadow of a satellite.

i look at everyone else, and their rocket launches into space all seem to be going quite well. and i'm still grounded, plagued with a lot of technical problems.

october 4, 1918 seems to be a more appropriate metaphor than october 4, 1957. on that day, according to wikipedia, "An explosion occurred killing more than 100 and destroying the T.A. Gillespie Company Shell Loading Plant in Sayreville, New Jersey. Fires and explosions continued for three days forcing massive evacuations and spreading ordnance over a wide area, pieces of which are still being found in 2007." explosions. exactly.

plane crashes prove to be another fitting metaphor. my birthday seems to have an affinity for them. on october 4, 1960, "Eastern Air Lines Flight 375, a Lockheed L-188 Electra, crashes on takeoff from Boston's Logan International Airport, killing 62 of 72 on board after a bird strike." on october 4, 1975, "A Cessna 310Q airplane crashes over Wilmington, North Carolina, killing the pilot and severely injuring several pro wrestlers affiliated with the NWA's Mid-Atlantic promotion." on october 4, 1992, "An El Al Boeing 747-200F crashes into two apartment buildings in Amsterdam, killing 43 including 38 on the ground." on october 4, 2001, "A Sibir Airlines Tupolev TU-154 crashes into the Black Sea after being struck by an errant Ukrainian S-200 missile. 78 people are killed." this is too much.

but come to think of it, why on earth am i moping? when the americans learned that the soviets successfully sent sputnik into space, what did they do? well, yeah, they did get paranoid for a while, imagining that the soviets would soon be dropping bombs on them from space. but they eventually got back their composure and went to work. they kicked off their own space program. they created NASA. they guided the whole country in the moon's direction and said to themselves, that's where we're going. and off they went.

it wasn't without hitches of course. it started pretty badly. when the US tried to launch their first satellite on december 6, 1957, the vanguard rocket carrying it flew for a total of 2 seconds, traveled 4 feet into the air, and then boom. it became one of the most expensive fireworks displays in history. it also took rangers 1 to 6 before ranger 7 became the first unmanned american ship to land on the moon. the soviets must have had a great time laughing at the americans' expense.

and even more tragic, during a training exercise at the kennedy space center on january 27, 1967, a spark somewhere in the apollo 1 space capsule's 50 km of wiring caused a fire to break out inside. killed were the 3 astronauts on board: virgil grissom, ed white and roger chaffee. on the memorial plaque for the three men was written, 'ad astra per aspera'. a rough road leads to the stars.

yet like anyone who has ever fallen down, you have no other choice really, but to get up off your butt, dust your self off, and carry on. and on july 20, 1969, the eagle landed, and the apollo 11 astronauts neil armstrong and buzz aldrin set foot on the moon.

who knows, one day, i might go to the moon. or mars. or even the stars. but first, i have to find a way to get off the ground.

and i hope i don't crash.

another reason why i will never be a doctor or nurse

i eavesdrop on the neighboring tables while having my cappuccino. don't blame me, i can't help it. a sharpened sense of hearing is one of caffeine's side effects, and i can't just turn it off. so while having my caffeine fix last friday, i found myself listening to an interesting conversation.

seated on the table next to me were 3 nursing students. apparently, one of them was a senior, and he was dishing out advice to the other 2, on how to get scholarships, getting through nursing school, surviving their hospital training, and landing a job in the states. the topic of conversation then shifted to their patients.

they had one patient who discovered he had bladder cancer because he was peeing blood. there was another patient, a young girl, who got burned all over due to an unfortunate kitchen accident. they talked about body fluids coming out, IV fluids coming in, pain medication, all the gory details.

'so how's mr. X in room Y?', asked one about another patient. 'oh... he just died', answered the other. they pause for a few seconds, 'so how's the coffee?'

it's curious how numb those 3 nurses have become. i can imagine them looking at their patients like grease monkeys trying to fix a busted car engine. true, desensitizing your own feelings should be a requirement in any medical career, since not doing so would leave you too paralyzed with sadness over the rising body count, too crippled w/ despair over the pain and suffering you witness firsthand. it's tough, but someone's got to do it. which is another reason i can never be a doctor or a nurse: you have to kill off a certain part of your humanity to function properly.

a case in point (though rather extreme): the senior nurse in the conversation talked about a fellow nurse he worked with. they had this patient, an old man, who was too frail to even put on his medical gown. but the nurse, who never paid attention to the old man in his struggle with his gown, just went on with her measurements of the IV drip rate. this came to the attention of their supervising nurse, who chastised the robot nurse. the robot nurse then shrugged and answered, 'sige sir', then went on her way.

why is the cow smiling?

does it know it's about to become 'classic sirloin steak'? or is it happy that it's about to become 'classic sirloin steak'?