Sunday Currently #13

It is almost midnight here but I still need to tick “write a blog post” off of my to-do list so, yeah — magtae tayo ng Sunday Currently.

I am currently

reading Tell the Machine Goodnight by Katie Williams.

writing, uy, I actually have a work in progress this time. I’m not sure if I will ever finish it but, hey, at least I started.

listening to “Got to Believe in Magic” by Side A.

Kids, can any of you tell me how two people find each other? In a world…that’s full of strangers? 👉👈🥺

watching, or had just watched Isa Pa With Feelings. I didn’t really watch it though. I just put it on as background noise while I was writing an artik for a friend. I had already seen the film so it wasn’t distracting whatsoever.

Ayy, funny story: I actually watched this movie in a theater back when watching movies in a theater was not yet buwis-buhay. It was me and probably 10 other Filipinos in an 80-seat cinema.

A few minutes into the film, while Maine Mendoza was dancing to a KZ Tandingan song the morning of her board exams, an African family walked into the cinema. The mom led the pack, and she was taking curious glances at the screen while finding her way up the dimly lit steps. When she got to the row where I was seated, she stopped and asked me in a semi-loud whisper, “Is this film in English?”

“It’s not,” I told her. I also shook my head in case she didn’t hear me.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, it’s—” I contemplated if I should say Tagalog or Filipino, hahaha, so I went with, “It’s not in English.”

She turned to look at the screen, and so did the rest of her family. The KZ Tandingan song was over at this point. Maine stopped dancing in her balcony because her neighbor, the character played by Carlo Aquino, caught her. Tinginan portion lang sila, and I realized that the mom who asked me if the movie was in English was waiting for the characters to speak. Of course they didn’t speak.

The next scene was the scene of the board exams, and the first line the mom heard was uttered by the proctor: “You may begin.” The mom threw me a confused glance and proceeded to walk further up the steps with her family. Hala! She probably thought I was lying. I low-key wanted to tell her that, mam, hindi po kita niloloko, pramis Tagalog po ito, but we were in a dark theater and the film had already started.

The family stayed for a good five to 10 minutes before they realized that, well, I wasn’t lying. They were probably hella confused by the dialog too — we Filipinos use a lot of English words even in everyday speech, don’t we? Sorryyy.

Anyway, that’s it. It wasn’t a funny story pala. Naalala ko lang haha.

thinking about, umm, nothing in particular naman.

smelling the sweet scent of adobong pinya at sitaw.

wishing for a neighbor who looks like Carlo Aquino. The few neighbors that I’ve encountered so far in the hallway all look like the mayor from Schitt’s Creek.