My side of the bed. Hehe.
Sunday, December 05, 2004
Thursday, December 02, 2004
Saturday, November 13, 2004
Thursday, November 04, 2004
Cafe Ysabel, 1927: A new take on my wedding theme
Recently, I've taken an interest in the vintage wedding theme. It was partly inspired by the lovely antique feel of Cafe Ysabel and the way I've always loved the architecture of Cafe Ysabel with its lace-like woodwork. Vier asked Gene when the house was built and he said: 1927. Wow! I researched on the period and I got so excited. The music of the time was Dixieland Jazz! The reigning artists were Louie Armstrong, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington. The craze was Art Deco and the inspiration of the decade was Paris. Just perfect. Of course I won't go as far as having my bridesmaids wear flapper dresses. I'm not sure if women in the Philippines ever took to that fashion mode, anyway. My wedding dress will still have lace (which was still a popular material all the way to the 1930's). I'm so excited. :)
Thursday, September 23, 2004
Love-Song
One of my favorite love poems is copied below. This particular translation I love. I post it here in celebration of my continuing love story and all the love stories that hold the world together.
LOVE SONG
by Rainer Maria Rilke
How shall I hold my soul, that it may not
be touching yours? How shall I lift it then
above you to where other things are waiting?
Ah, gladly would I lodge it, all-forgot
with some lost thing the dark is isolating
on some remote and silent spot that, when
your depths vibrate, is not itself vibrating.
You and me — all that lights upon us, though
brings us together like a fiddle-bow
drawing one voice from two strings it glides along.
Across what instrument have we been spanned?
And what violinist holds us in his hand?
O sweetest song.
LOVE SONG
by Rainer Maria Rilke
How shall I hold my soul, that it may not
be touching yours? How shall I lift it then
above you to where other things are waiting?
Ah, gladly would I lodge it, all-forgot
with some lost thing the dark is isolating
on some remote and silent spot that, when
your depths vibrate, is not itself vibrating.
You and me — all that lights upon us, though
brings us together like a fiddle-bow
drawing one voice from two strings it glides along.
Across what instrument have we been spanned?
And what violinist holds us in his hand?
O sweetest song.
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Tuesday, September 07, 2004
Rilke's Seventh Letter
Below is my favorite letter from Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet." I first read this in my third year of college for a Philosophy class and it made a great impression on me. It has shaped my own view of love in the same manner that reading "A Road Less Travelled" by M. Scott Peck also radically changed how I view relationships.
I think it greatly helps in meditating on marriage. To marry someone is to trust in the difficult. To love in the authentic sense. To love for the long haul.
Letter Seven
Rome May 14, 1904
My dear Mr. Kappus,
Much time has passed since I received your last letter. Please don't hold that against me; first it was work, then a number of interruptions, and finally poor health that again and again kept me from answering, because I wanted my answer to come to you out of peaceful and happy days. Now I feel somewhat better again (the beginning of spring with its moody, bad-tempered transitions was hard to bear here too) and once again, dear Mr. Kappus, I can greet you and talk to you (which I do with real pleasure) about this and that in response to your letter, as well as I can.
You see: I have copied out your sonnet, * because I found that it is lovely and simple born in the shape that it moves in with such quiet decorum. It is the best poem of yours that you have let me read. And now I am giving you this copy because I know that it is important and full of new experience to rediscover a work of one's own in someone else's handwriting. Read the poem as if you had never seen it before, and you will feel in your innermost being how very much it is your own.
It was a pleasure for me to read this sonnet and your letter, often; I thank you for both.
And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it. This very wish, if you use it calmly and prudently and like a tool, will help you spread out your solitude over a great distance. Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.
It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time ahead and far on into life, is - ; solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent - ?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.
But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. . . . : And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come. And loses the vast distances and possibilities, gives up the approaching and fleeing of gentle, prescient Things in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many conventions that have been put up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous road. No area of human experience is so extensively provided with conventions as this one is: there are live-preservers of the most varied invention, boats and water wings; society has been able to create refuges of very sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.
It is true that many young people who love falsely, i.e., simply surrendering themselves and giving up their solitude (the average person will of course always go on doing that - ), feel oppressed by their failure and want to make the situation they have landed in livable and fruitful in their own, personal way -. For their nature tells them that the questions of love, even more than everything else that is important, cannot be resolved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case require a new, special, wholly personal answer -. But how can they, who have already flung themselves together and can no longer tell whose outlines are whose, who thus no longer possess anything of their won, how can they find a way out of themselves, out of the depths of their already buried solitude?
They act out of mutual helplessness, and then if, whit the best of intentions, they try to escape the conventions that is approaching them (marriage, for example), they fall into the clutches of some less obvious but just as deadly conventional solution. For then everything around them is - convention. Wherever people act out of a prematurely fused, muddy communion, every action is conventional: every relation that such confusion leads to has its own convention, however unusual (i.e., in the ordinary sense immoral) it may be; even separating would be a conventional step, an impersonal, accidental decision without strength and without fruit.
Whoever looks seriously will find that neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any clarification, any solution, any hint of a path been perceived; and for both these tasks, which we carry wrapped up and hand on without opening, there is not general, agreed-upon rule that can be discovered. But in the same measure in which we begin to test life as individuals, these great Things will come to meet us, the individuals, with greater intimacy. The claims that the difficult work of love makes upon our development are greater than life, and we, as beginners, are not equal to them. But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their being, - then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us. That would be much.
We are only just now beginning to consider the relation of one individual to a second individual objectively and without prejudice, and our attempts to live such relationships have no model before them. And yet in the changes that time has brought about there are already many things that can help our timid novitiate.
The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing be imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous) disguises just so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the deforming influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become riper and more human in their depths than light, easygoing man, who is not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of any bodily fruit and who, arrogant and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it. Someday (and even now, especially in the countries of northern Europe, trustworthy signs are already speaking and shining), someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.
This advance (at first very much against the will of the outdistanced men) will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman. And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: the two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.
And one more thing: Don't think that the great love which was once granted to you, when you were a boy, has been lost; how can you know whether vast and generous wishes didn't ripen in you at that time, and purposes by which you are still living today? I believe that that love remains strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life.
- All good wished to you, dear Mr. Kappus!
Yours, Rainer Maria Rilke
I think it greatly helps in meditating on marriage. To marry someone is to trust in the difficult. To love in the authentic sense. To love for the long haul.
Letter Seven
Rome May 14, 1904
My dear Mr. Kappus,
Much time has passed since I received your last letter. Please don't hold that against me; first it was work, then a number of interruptions, and finally poor health that again and again kept me from answering, because I wanted my answer to come to you out of peaceful and happy days. Now I feel somewhat better again (the beginning of spring with its moody, bad-tempered transitions was hard to bear here too) and once again, dear Mr. Kappus, I can greet you and talk to you (which I do with real pleasure) about this and that in response to your letter, as well as I can.
You see: I have copied out your sonnet, * because I found that it is lovely and simple born in the shape that it moves in with such quiet decorum. It is the best poem of yours that you have let me read. And now I am giving you this copy because I know that it is important and full of new experience to rediscover a work of one's own in someone else's handwriting. Read the poem as if you had never seen it before, and you will feel in your innermost being how very much it is your own.
It was a pleasure for me to read this sonnet and your letter, often; I thank you for both.
And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it. This very wish, if you use it calmly and prudently and like a tool, will help you spread out your solitude over a great distance. Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.
It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time ahead and far on into life, is - ; solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent - ?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.
But this is what young people are so often and so disastrously wrong in doing they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. . . . : And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come. And loses the vast distances and possibilities, gives up the approaching and fleeing of gentle, prescient Things in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come; nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment, and poverty, and the escape into one of the many conventions that have been put up in great numbers like public shelters on this most dangerous road. No area of human experience is so extensively provided with conventions as this one is: there are live-preservers of the most varied invention, boats and water wings; society has been able to create refuges of very sort, for since it preferred to take love-life as an amusement, it also had to give it an easy form, cheap, safe, and sure, as public amusements are.
It is true that many young people who love falsely, i.e., simply surrendering themselves and giving up their solitude (the average person will of course always go on doing that - ), feel oppressed by their failure and want to make the situation they have landed in livable and fruitful in their own, personal way -. For their nature tells them that the questions of love, even more than everything else that is important, cannot be resolved publicly and according to this or that agreement; that they are questions, intimate questions from one human being to another, which in any case require a new, special, wholly personal answer -. But how can they, who have already flung themselves together and can no longer tell whose outlines are whose, who thus no longer possess anything of their won, how can they find a way out of themselves, out of the depths of their already buried solitude?
They act out of mutual helplessness, and then if, whit the best of intentions, they try to escape the conventions that is approaching them (marriage, for example), they fall into the clutches of some less obvious but just as deadly conventional solution. For then everything around them is - convention. Wherever people act out of a prematurely fused, muddy communion, every action is conventional: every relation that such confusion leads to has its own convention, however unusual (i.e., in the ordinary sense immoral) it may be; even separating would be a conventional step, an impersonal, accidental decision without strength and without fruit.
Whoever looks seriously will find that neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any clarification, any solution, any hint of a path been perceived; and for both these tasks, which we carry wrapped up and hand on without opening, there is not general, agreed-upon rule that can be discovered. But in the same measure in which we begin to test life as individuals, these great Things will come to meet us, the individuals, with greater intimacy. The claims that the difficult work of love makes upon our development are greater than life, and we, as beginners, are not equal to them. But if we nevertheless endure and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in the whole easy and frivolous game behind which people have hidden from the most solemn solemnity of their being, - then a small advance and a lightening will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us. That would be much.
We are only just now beginning to consider the relation of one individual to a second individual objectively and without prejudice, and our attempts to live such relationships have no model before them. And yet in the changes that time has brought about there are already many things that can help our timid novitiate.
The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing be imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous) disguises just so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the deforming influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become riper and more human in their depths than light, easygoing man, who is not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of any bodily fruit and who, arrogant and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it. Someday (and even now, especially in the countries of northern Europe, trustworthy signs are already speaking and shining), someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.
This advance (at first very much against the will of the outdistanced men) will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relationship that is meant to be between one human being and another, no longer one that flows from man to woman. And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this: the two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.
And one more thing: Don't think that the great love which was once granted to you, when you were a boy, has been lost; how can you know whether vast and generous wishes didn't ripen in you at that time, and purposes by which you are still living today? I believe that that love remains strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life.
- All good wished to you, dear Mr. Kappus!
Yours, Rainer Maria Rilke
Tuesday, August 17, 2004
Friday, August 06, 2004
On Marriage
A quotation from The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
Then Almitra spoke again and said, And what of Marriage, master?
And he answered saying:
You were born together, and together you shall be for evermore.
You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.
Aye, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness.And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.
Then Almitra spoke again and said, And what of Marriage, master?
And he answered saying:
You were born together, and together you shall be for evermore.
You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.
Aye, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness.And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.
Monday, July 26, 2004
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Water into Wine: Attending a Pre-Cana Seminar
Vand I just attended a Pre-Cana Marriage Seminar. It was extremely helpful, especially because we learned new skills together which will help us communicate better in the future. Also, I really appreciated the counselling per couple during the Marriage Expectations Inventory and Genogram activities. I think it was good that our discussions, as a couple, were guided.
All in all, the seminar helped us find ways to understand and love each other more. More than that, it also put our marriage in the context of a larger perspective: our country, the body of the Church and our ultimate destinies. I don't think it made us re-think our decision to marry. Rather, it reinforced our decision.
I liked our counsellor's suggestion for us to come up with a family (or couple) mission statement. It will help us define what we stand for and it will articulate our common goal or dream.
Towards the end of the seminar, Fr. Ted, one of the facilitators, read the passage on the Wedding at Cana. It was Jesus' first miracle and it happened to be at a wedding. The image of water turning into wine is a powerful one. For me, the miracle is a metaphor for marriage: you can take something as ordinary as empty clay jugs, fill it up with a basic element like water, but if you put in faith and love, you will have a source of spirit and celebration. And not just any kind of wine. The best kind.
All in all, the seminar helped us find ways to understand and love each other more. More than that, it also put our marriage in the context of a larger perspective: our country, the body of the Church and our ultimate destinies. I don't think it made us re-think our decision to marry. Rather, it reinforced our decision.
I liked our counsellor's suggestion for us to come up with a family (or couple) mission statement. It will help us define what we stand for and it will articulate our common goal or dream.
Towards the end of the seminar, Fr. Ted, one of the facilitators, read the passage on the Wedding at Cana. It was Jesus' first miracle and it happened to be at a wedding. The image of water turning into wine is a powerful one. For me, the miracle is a metaphor for marriage: you can take something as ordinary as empty clay jugs, fill it up with a basic element like water, but if you put in faith and love, you will have a source of spirit and celebration. And not just any kind of wine. The best kind.
Monday, July 05, 2004
Pamanhikan Memoirs
Venue: My house at R. Alvero St.
Hosts: My family
Guest List:
Tita Star
Eins, Chris and daughter Sabrina
Zwei and Tin-Tin
Drei, Yeng and kids: Thea, Miggy and Matthew
V of course
Funfy
Manong Paul (visiting Popi, our resident niece)
Menu:
Starters - Chicken and Asparagus Soup
2 Course Meal -
Naty's famous Bihon
Super Sarap Dry Adobo
Served with red rice
Desserts (mostly brought by V's family)-
Leche Flan
My favorite Coffee Crunch Cake from Red Ribbon
Pandan Cake
3 Gallons of Ice Cream (Pistachio, Cheese and Rocky Road)
Served with Coffee
Drinks -
Choice of Coke and Coke Light
Give-aways:
A Box of Bacolod Goodies
Hosts: My family
Guest List:
Tita Star
Eins, Chris and daughter Sabrina
Zwei and Tin-Tin
Drei, Yeng and kids: Thea, Miggy and Matthew
V of course
Funfy
Manong Paul (visiting Popi, our resident niece)
Menu:
Starters - Chicken and Asparagus Soup
2 Course Meal -
Naty's famous Bihon
Super Sarap Dry Adobo
Served with red rice
Desserts (mostly brought by V's family)-
Leche Flan
My favorite Coffee Crunch Cake from Red Ribbon
Pandan Cake
3 Gallons of Ice Cream (Pistachio, Cheese and Rocky Road)
Served with Coffee
Drinks -
Choice of Coke and Coke Light
Give-aways:
A Box of Bacolod Goodies
Monday, June 28, 2004
That's All
I can only give ya love that lasts forever
And the promise to be near each time you call
And the only heart I own
For you and you alone
That's all … that's all.
I can only give you country walks in springtime
And a hand to hold when leaves begin to fall
And a love who’s burnin’ light
Will warm the winter night.
That's all … that's all.
There are those I am sure who have told you
They would give you the world for a toy
All I have are these arms to enfold you
And a love time can never destroy.
If you're wonderin’ what I'm askin’ in return, dear
You'll be glad to know that my demands are small
Say it's me that you'll adore
For now and evermore
That's all … that's all.
Scat singing …
There are those I am sure who have told you
They would give you the world for a toy
All I have are these arms to enfold you
And a love time can never destroy.
If you're wonderin’ what I'm askin’ in return, dear
You'll be glad to know that my demands are small
Say it's me that you'll adore
Yeah … it’s me that that you’ll adore
For now and evermore
That's all … that's all.
And the promise to be near each time you call
And the only heart I own
For you and you alone
That's all … that's all.
I can only give you country walks in springtime
And a hand to hold when leaves begin to fall
And a love who’s burnin’ light
Will warm the winter night.
That's all … that's all.
There are those I am sure who have told you
They would give you the world for a toy
All I have are these arms to enfold you
And a love time can never destroy.
If you're wonderin’ what I'm askin’ in return, dear
You'll be glad to know that my demands are small
Say it's me that you'll adore
For now and evermore
That's all … that's all.
Scat singing …
There are those I am sure who have told you
They would give you the world for a toy
All I have are these arms to enfold you
And a love time can never destroy.
If you're wonderin’ what I'm askin’ in return, dear
You'll be glad to know that my demands are small
Say it's me that you'll adore
Yeah … it’s me that that you’ll adore
For now and evermore
That's all … that's all.
Some Initial Details
Some initial details:
Wedding Ceremony: Mary the Queen Church, San Juan, Pasig City
Reception: Cafe Ysabel
Motif: Old spanish lace and tea roses
Small and intimate gathering of all our close friends and family members, good food and old 50's songs (like "That's All" and staple Sinatra) playing in the background.
Wedding Ceremony: Mary the Queen Church, San Juan, Pasig City
Reception: Cafe Ysabel
Motif: Old spanish lace and tea roses
Small and intimate gathering of all our close friends and family members, good food and old 50's songs (like "That's All" and staple Sinatra) playing in the background.
Vier's Proposal
He proposed last Feb. 14, 2004, after dinner at Balai, Batangas. That was the same place we went to during the Lenten season in 2003, after which, he asked me to be his girlfriend.
He told me he was getting his cigar in his room. When he came back I asked him if I could try his cigar. We sat by the table with magazines and books. Everyone else was still having dinner at the long table.
As we sat together, he removed the paper band from the cigar and said, "Will you marry me?" Without missing a beat, I said yes. This wasn't the first time he brought it up. Then he said, "Will you wear this ring while you're waiting for the real one?" I said yes. And since at this point I really didn't think that a real proposal was forthcoming, I kidded him and said, "Hon, do I have to wear it every day? Baka it might get wet or 'punit'. Can I put it in my journal instead?" He laughed at that and said, "Hon, thank you for accepting the paper ring. Since you accepted the paper version, I'm sure you'll accept the real one." At that, I gasped. He drew out a black box from his pocket and presented it to me. I said, "What's that?" and he said, "Open it and you'll see." I felt dazed and disoriented. When I opened it, I saw the ring. "Oh my God!" was all I could say. I asked him if we could tell the others but he said to call my Dad first. I called him. That was when I started crying. It hit me that I was actually engaged to be married to this wonderful guy. He spoke to Vier for a while and then we called a his Mom and couple of friends. His sister, Eins, also called. Actually, the whole day his Mom and his sister were calling him to ask if he had already proposed.
It was unforgettable.
He told me he was getting his cigar in his room. When he came back I asked him if I could try his cigar. We sat by the table with magazines and books. Everyone else was still having dinner at the long table.
As we sat together, he removed the paper band from the cigar and said, "Will you marry me?" Without missing a beat, I said yes. This wasn't the first time he brought it up. Then he said, "Will you wear this ring while you're waiting for the real one?" I said yes. And since at this point I really didn't think that a real proposal was forthcoming, I kidded him and said, "Hon, do I have to wear it every day? Baka it might get wet or 'punit'. Can I put it in my journal instead?" He laughed at that and said, "Hon, thank you for accepting the paper ring. Since you accepted the paper version, I'm sure you'll accept the real one." At that, I gasped. He drew out a black box from his pocket and presented it to me. I said, "What's that?" and he said, "Open it and you'll see." I felt dazed and disoriented. When I opened it, I saw the ring. "Oh my God!" was all I could say. I asked him if we could tell the others but he said to call my Dad first. I called him. That was when I started crying. It hit me that I was actually engaged to be married to this wonderful guy. He spoke to Vier for a while and then we called a his Mom and couple of friends. His sister, Eins, also called. Actually, the whole day his Mom and his sister were calling him to ask if he had already proposed.
It was unforgettable.
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