Watch Me Entertain Myself!

Sacha Guitry once said, "You can pretend to be serious, but you can't pretend to be witty." Oh yes, I'm the great pretender.
(pilot episode: 20 January 2004)

Monday, February 23, 2009

Epi-funny (Delos Santos Avenue)

“So I shouldn’t tell him?” I asked my friend Leigh.

“No,” she quickly replied. And to drive home the point, she hacked away at the beef belly on her plate. Considering that Dome Café’s grilled beef belly is juicy and tender (I tried it, it’s heavenly), her knife easily bit into the plate.

“And why not?” I asked.

When I discuss things, I’d like to go over every thing methodically. I try to enumerate step-by-step the way in which I arrive at a conclusion, no matter how intricately complex or obviously simple those steps are. I can be quite thorough in my obviousness.

But this time, I was genuinely stumped. “So why not?” I asked again.

Leigh was busy cutting her meat. “Because…” and she paused, but continued slicing away. “Because…” she started again, her cutting more frantic. She was groping for the accurate thing to say, and she was taking out her frustration on the poor meat.

The suspense was killing me. “Because it’s bad timing?” I prodded her. “Because it’s too much information?” Impatient me was taking over. “Because…” but she cut me off.

“… it’s selfish!” she finished my sentence while triumphantly raising her knife. “You’re being selfish! Yes, that’s it. Selfish.” She pointed her knife at me one last time before returning to slicing her beef belly.

Meanwhile I felt queasy in my belly.

Sometimes the danger of asking your friends what they think is that their knowledge of you can actually be a baggage that blindsides them. But the moment those words left her lips, I knew she bull’s-eyed it. My head felt light all of a sudden. Then my eyes grew wide and my jaw dropped as realization sank in.

“Leigh! You slapped me!” I practically yelled at her.

She dropped her knife and fork and started laughing out loud.

“You just slapped me and stabbed me in the front!” I didn’t care anymore if the people walking past our table outside Dome in Shangri-La Mall could hear me.

“Imsorryimsorry…” she grasped my hands while giggling in between apologies.

“No!” I said. “It’s great. This is great! This is good. I really needed that. Thanks. I really needed that,” I assured her, even though my head was spinning and my neck felt whip-lashed.

And we both laughed our ass off.

Don’t you just hate it and love it when your closest friends tell you exactly what you need to hear?

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's what real friends are for. ^^

A.Dimaano said...

That's just the way I want/need my friends to be =)

Ming Meows said...

Ano naman ang kinalaman ng EdSA ditu?

joelmcvie said...

@MING: Wala.

~Carrie~ said...

Ayon sa Medical definition, victor basa:

Epi-: Prefix taken from the Greek that means "on, upon, at, by, near, over, on top of, toward, against, among." As in epicanthal fold (a fold of skin that comes down across the inner angle, the canthus, of the eye; epicardium (a layer of fibrous tissue that surrounds the heart and the roots of the great blood vessels); episclera (a thin membrane on top of the sclera, the white of the eye); epidural anesthetic (an anesthetic injected into the epidural space surrounding the fluid-filled sac, called the dura, around the spine which partially numbs the abdomen and legs); etc.

Since the entry is an anecdote, it's funny. Kaya epi-funny. We gays love to play with words pa naman, so epi-funny delos santos ave. Eh, it sounds like ephiphany, which literally means to manifest or to SHOW. Eh di ba, mcVie Show itechie agbayani?

Holler back, if you think I'm on crack. Haha.

joelmcvie said...

@CARRIE, PhD: OMG, isa kang henyo. =)

~Carrie~ said...

high lang ako. wahahaha

palma tayona said...

@ carrie: nakaka-relate ako sa birit mo tsong. kapag lasing ako, ganyan din ang banat ko na mangangailangan ng diksyunaryo kausap ko. otherwise, if i am sober melanie marquez ako. hehehe...

so joel, ang tanong... WHO is it you're being SELFISH with? :-) we're all, er, "ears". :-)