Ang Kape Ni LaTtEX

I know it’s 1 AM, and it’s way past my bedtime. But an email I’m sending (2.5 megs worth) is taking an eternity to upload, and my head is aching from the coffee (bawal sakin pero I miss it na talaga) and can’t sleep, so here I am, blogging instead.

The out-of-town-trip last weekend was great. I think CJ enjoys going to Pangasinan; she goes ballistic whenever she hears the machine-gun pace of Ilocano conversations. Maybe she’ll learn the dialect some day; mommy is already proposing that she spend her summer vacations there. Well, we’ll cross the bridge when we get there. We’d deal first with accompanying CJ to her first baby swimming lesson this Saturday (hopefully, if slots aren’t filled up). I also ought to take Ilocano up myself.

Speaking of language, part of that trip was attending the wedding of one of my wife’s relatives. It was a garden wedding held in a farm in Santa Maria, Pangasinan. The ceremony was officiated by a local Christian reverend (the bride and groom weren’t Catholic, and I couldn’t figure out exactly which sect they were part of). Along with the start of the wedding procession came some eccentric things which I haven’t seen in any other wedding until that day: the entourage’s members’ names were all announced while Pista sa Nayon music was played in the background, the emcee’s announcement came across as Engrish, and all of the principal sponsors were female, with the guys probably either were overcome with stage fright, or were late or absent.

The reverend’s Engrish was worse: it is the first time I have heard of the phrase “family relationship” and the word “cheerer” (which on hindsight was probably cherish mispronounced) in the vows, as well as pluralization of all possible words (always ending with “ssss”). When the reverend shifted to Tagalog it didn’t get any better; he couldn’t even remember the word for parents (magulang). He then shifted to Ilocano and that was the only time he appeared to speak comfortably.

I hope people would stick to their vernacular for solemn ceremonies for a change. Sets a better mood to a wedding than desperately groping with English but ending up speaking JapGerFrench instead.

Later that evening we boarded a bus for Manila. Of note were the checkpoints set up en route to the Imperial Capital. The soldiers and police pretended to inspect our airconditioned bus while visibly doing a more diligent search on colorum (unlicensed) and ordinary (non-airconditioned) buses: they don’t expect hakot protesters in aircon buses anyways. On the other hand, the road cuisine was good: we got delicious boiled peanuts and a 4-pack of succulently boiled native corn at 10 pesos a pack. The chicharon was also particularly good, although each titillating bite was accompanied by a pang of guilt for eating pure cholesterol.

The following morning, despite the SONA, the writers for my freelance job (editing highschool IT books) apparently ignored the holiday announcement and went on to email me the next lesson, which I diligently edited after playing SimCity 4 for 5 straight hours. Tonight I’m up and awake because of another chapter (I’m obliged to send it in before 12 noon the following day) which incidentally is the 2.5 meg file I was talking about above. It feels good being able to technical edit highschool books — makes me feel that I’m helping kids by keeping them from misinformation on subjects that I know quite well.

Well, the email has been sent now. Time to go to bed.

Goodnight (or rather, goodmorning), Pilipinas.

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Update: Upon looking at my post title I realized that it was oxymoronic. Editing was misspelled with a double “t”. Good thing I’m a technical editor, not a proofreader, but that’s not an excuse of course.