1. The company party at Hotel H2O means I have a pretty good time spacing out watching three rays, a shark, and a couple of eels make the rounds of a humongous aquarium.
2. Class getting cancelled allows me to work on a new paper building, the first original piece I've liked in a long time.
3. Cris and I take a nice, long, quiet drive in the rain from Quezon City to Manila, with stops at Dunkin Donuts and Bee Cheng Hiang.
4. My family gets together for my grandmother's 80th birthday party.
a. Cris helps with the party, dances, makes conversation, and generally becomes my most-liked boyfriend ever.
b. My youngest brother Mon says more to me in two minutes about the TDKR shooting than he has about anything else in the past year, and I am pleasantly surprised at how articulate he can be.
c. Later, he shares his plot to make Cris uncomfortable all night.
— "Yeah, and I'm going to stand next to him and say, 'I can smell your fear.'"
d. Mikko and Paolo are the best dancers.
e. My family figures out how those party popper cylinders work (one-time use, my ass) and proceeds to make a mess of the Aristocrat function room.
— Dad (52) and Paolo (7) chase each other around the room with loaded cylinders, using flower foam and parts of centerpieces as ammunition.
— "If we were a Westerosi house, our words would probably have 'projectiles' in them."
5. My parents, brothers, and I get Sunday all to ourselves.
a. We suspect Sakae Sushi stops putting out "that red plate yellow caviar fish" after we take it all off the belt.
b. Drum Tao makes me want to dedicate my life to music, martial arts, and having ridiculously gorgeous abs, arms, and back muscles.
c. Dad buys a table for me in Gensan, takes it apart, brings it to Manila, and reassembles it in my apartment. <3
d. After they leave, I go to bed feeling both happy and lonely.
--
Last night, I dreamt possibly my best dream ever. I can't remember any previous dream like this where I wasn't on some kind of quest; the most I felt I had to do in this dream was to land a raft to reinflate it a bit. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.
My cousins, brothers, and I, plus I think my dad and/or a boatman, took a boat out on a sunny day.
That's it. That's all. No strange baroque hotels with ghost parties, no inability to keep my eyes open while a magical swivel chair took me on a tour of an Aztec temple hotel, no orphan children to shepherd across a purple strait, no Ed Westwick in smoking jacket sneering at me while a horizontal elevator took me through a hotel full of girls, no naked mummy-god-prince to escort past a motorcycle gang, no taxi rides past a hotel that looked like a cross between an Indian temple and a Mattias Adolfsson drawing.
(Yeah, I dream a lot about hotels.)
We just went out on a boat for a swim. We dropped anchor where we felt like it, near some isolated, tiny islands, and just swam around and had fun. I think there was a picnic on the boat. I didn't feel stressed or dissatisfied, just happy to be out and enjoying the beautiful blue water, pale sky, and lovely islands. I only wished Cris had been there. The water felt perfect, by the way, and the sun was just right.
A little later, a semi-submerged inflatable yellow raft came to me, and I recognized it as an ex-boyfriend's, for some reason. This didn't bother me; I just got on and paddled around the sea. I enjoyed myself and the fact that it was okay to have fun with this raft, despite knowing that it had belonged to that ex, as if the raft had been a gift that had literally floated toward me, out of the blue. As it was only half-submerged, I just needed to take a quick break to add more air to the raft, so I paddled to the shore and pulled the raft onto the sand. In the background, I could hear my brothers and cousins splashing and having fun.
I don't think I've ever had such an easy dream before.
