IMHO

Ask And You Shall Receive

Day 8
9 March 2006

My alarm went off at 6:45 a.m. but I’d been awake even earlier than that…anxiously waiting to ambush the garbage truck! But the minutes and hours went by, with no trash collector in sight. Grrr. Although it had rained hard the night before, ensuring freezing temperatures in the area (and most especially in the trunk of my car), I dreaded what kind of odors had developed in my chariot overnight. In the meantime, I began preparing for my morning prayer time.

But not before I heard the clattering of a truck making its way down the narrow Mirador road…no, not the garbage truck, but, could it be? An LPG delivery vehicle! With marvelous blue tanks full of petroleum gas clanking about in its hold. Good golly, what a sight for sore eyes…looks like I won’t be needing powerlifting guests after all!

Today’s Gospel was from Matthew 7:7-12, a beloved verse which begins, “Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be answered…” A welcome reassurance from the Boss, especially after my waking conversation with Him begging that He show me His will. And so as I often try to do, I laid before Him all my new plans and desires and dreams, and then some…asked for His perfect will to prevail, and asked as well by way of postscript for a way to deal with the trash situation (He’d already dealt with the LPG debacle, after all).

After which, and considering I’ve been eating the same cold batch of rice since SUNDAY (yugh!), I decided to treat myself to lunch on Session Road before my meeting with my BC expert. I held my breath as I opened my car door, worried sick that the insides would reek like a week-old corpse…but turns out that my imagination went into hyperdrive, as usual. There were no strange stinky smells, but my worries still nagged me as I drove into the much warmer lower-lying areas of town. I kept a lookout for possible dumping areas, and, disco! A garbage bin big enough to hold one of my huge loot bags, in Burnham Park. I threw the smellier of the two bags into the receptacle, as discreetly as possible, and contemplated stuffing the other in as well…but thought better of it. Maybe on the way home.

Before I parked at SMBC (I’ve been spending waaaay too much time for comfort in this place), I gassed up at a Caltex, where the attendants were attendant and attentive to a T: washing my windshield, offering to check my oil and water, complimenting my appearance (nothing quite like “Ang ganda mo, Ma’am!” said without the characteristic sarcasm as one speeds off into the distance)… And, get this, the unbelievable offer of a lifetime: “Do you have any trash in the car that you’d like to dispose of?” Hmm!! I replied, with an evil grin, “I actually have a BIG BAG of trash in the back I need to get rid of, you sure that would be OK?” And of course the guy said “of course!” He very promptly got rid of it, with a smile, and a parting compliment from his companion…I think I shall gas up at that station every day. Ask and you shall receive indeed, problem suddenly SOLVED! Thank you, Abba. :-)

Other treats from the Father today: a full, two-viand meal (decent servings of hamonado pork, steamed ginger chicken and rice) for 60 pesos at the food court at Porta Vaga (which I had to check out for the article), and, HELLER, DSL net access on my laptop for an hour and a half (I think!) for the unbelievable sum of TEN PESOS (20 US cents?!) at the Got Hub? net café at PV. Either the lady at the counter was mistaken or I’ve just been too jaded by Manila prices, but hey, that deal made me very, very happy.

I’ve still got to wean myself from the Manila habit of having to rush frantically through traffic from one appointment to another (giving a lead time of at least one hour to travel say, from one end of QC to the other), so it was very weird to log off from my net session 15 minutes before my appointment, just to cross the street to my interviewee’s building with, uh, 13 minutes to spare? I have to get the rush-rush bug out of my system if I want to properly integrate into this lifestyle. BC may look like a (mini) city and may sometimes act like a city, but it thankfully still doesn’t move at the frenetical pace that besets Manila!

Atty. Sanidad gave me a great lead and an amazing set of photos for my article, and, after changing back into more comfortable footware and dumping my laptop in a safe place, I took a walking tour of Session Road. Won’t go into any more details; you’ll have to read the resultant article instead. But yay! What a good day. Ask, and you shall receive indeed. Will let you know as soon as I receive the other things asked for. :-)

posted by Honey Oliveros @ 1:30 PM