This ordinary day

It’s nearly midnight on a Friday, and I’m writing from my room at the Cebu City Marriott Hotel.

I’m exhausted from visiting six supermarkets, from the southernmost to the northernmost ends of the city, in four hours.

I’m trying not to hate the fact that I’m working tomorrow—a Saturday, two weekends to my Berklee audition—when I could be practicing. Or working out. Or resting.

An hour ago, I was sitting in the UCC Café next to the hotel, trying to blog—but a playlist that totally went against my musical aesthetic, with highlights such as “Heaven Knows”, “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” and “Love Will Lead You Back” made it impossible to write anything.

A while ago, I watched my latest video of me performing my Berklee audition piece, which I shot this morning just before I left the house for the airport. I spotted two glaring mistakes.

Next door, a Korean couple—or are they Japanese?—is arguing loudly in heavily accented English.

Despite all this, I’m happy. And it’s not just a “la la la, yeah, I’m kinda happy” happy that I’m feeling; rather, it’s a “deep down inside I feel peaceful, agreeable, happy” happy. And it's a happy I've been feeling all afternoon.

The day started out with me being my typical bitchy, one-eyebrow-raised, eyeballs-all-set-to-roll-at-slightest-provocation self.

At the first security check at the airport, a middle-aged guy shamelessly plopped his bag into the small space ahead of mine on the conveyor belt, and just laughed sheepishly when he saw me glaring up at him (he was at least half a foot taller). “Yeah, go ahead. GO AHEAD,” I said, loudly and crisply enough for the whole queue to hear.

At the second security check, another middle-aged guy inadvertently shoved me through the metal detector with his forty-six inch beer belly. No amount of glaring elicited any response from this one.

After the final security check, I realized my boarding pass said boarding time was 10 AM, when my flight was supposed to be 9 AM—and I hadn’t been told at check-in that the flight was delayed. I walked from one end of the waiting area to the other, looking for an information counter I could clarify with. There was none. And please, these lousy packed lunches that serve as consuelo de bobo for delayed flights do not make the delays forgiveable. (I resolved to ask my well-traveled friends if I was right in assuming that Manila had the world’s crappiest airports.)

And to cap it off, I couldn’t find any decent food in the airport. I ended up with a chicken sandwich and a latte from Tinder Box—not without suffering through Tinder Box's dark, overcrowded gas chamber, with its fog of second-hand smoke.

Strangely enough, once I had had my sandwich and my latte, and had sat down at one of those Laptop Stations considerately placed in the Centennial Terminal (one thing the airport people actually did right, I thought)—the happiness began. And it just kept coming.

Within the 1.5 hour flight delay, I was able to finish transcribing my audition piece—something I had been stressing over, with too many parts of the piece still ambiguous in my mind, and with the audition only two weekends away. It was marvelously productive; and the process of transcribing not just the melody, but also the harmonic nuances and the bass line, proved to be excellent ear training too.

During the flight, I was able to start my next “grand blog entry” (not this one, something more thought through, hahaha). And I was hugely thankful that I had brought my Mac. Coming from years of using a PC during flights to Cebu—i.e., booting up for 10 minutes and actually laptopping for only 20 minutes between take-off and landing—my Mac's super-fast boot-up and shutdown times were unbelievably refreshing.

At the Cebu airport, I was lucky enough to get a cab that smelled good (for some reason, many Cebu cabs don’t) and a driver who didn’t try to talk me into checking into another hotel which had promised him commissions. He and his cab were so pleasant that I asked him to be my driver for the afternoon’s visits to six stores. (And later in the afternoon, I became even more thankful for him when I saw the monstrous queues for cabs at the stores I visited.)

Checking in at the hotel, I was told by a Jolina-looking front desk officer that she was giving me a room with two single beds on the smoking floor. I was more than ready to freak out when she told me that “my request for a king-size bed on a non-smoking floor” had been rejected—my next line would have been “how come I wasn’t informed, I would have booked a room someplace else”—but somehow, she found a way to get me a room I wanted even before I could get in an ill-tempered word.

On my way to lunch in Ayala Center, I dropped by the Rockport store, on the off-chance that they would have winter shoes. Chances were slim, I knew—the Rockports in Trinoma, and Shangri-La had nothing, and given the options I had found in Manila, I had begun to ruefully accept that I would be walking around snowy Boston in expensive, manly shoes that would make me look like I was about to climb a mountain. But lo and behold, Rockport Cebu had not one, but TWO pairs that fit all my specifications—waterproof, high- to mid-cut, insulated, and most importantly, chocolate-colored to match my new winter coat. And at 30% off, they were cheaper than any of my Manila options. I told the salespeople there, I would have lunch, and come right back.

I had lunch at Idea Italia, and my tomato soup and penne campagniole were so good that when the waitress asked, almost apologetically, if I would mind transferring to the table in the corner so that a large group coming in could take my table and the table beside it; and an elderly woman in this incoming large group invited me to join their “Christian group activities” later that day; and one of the waitresses was gushing over a chubby blond baby one of the foreign diners had let her carry--my eyebrows stayed unraised and my nasty thought balloons remained defated. Instead, it was a “you’re welcome, no problem at all” when I was asked to move tables; “thank you, but sorry, I need to work today” when I was invited to join the Christian group; and a smiling “kala ko hindi mo na ibabalik” to the waitress with the baby.

Over lunch, James and I actually started texting. It had begun with me asking if there were new places to eat, and it evolved into how nice Ayala Center Cebu now was, how James should try Idea Italia next time he’s home in Cebu, and how many new chihuahuas James’ dad now had at home. It was our first extensive conversation since the start of the year, and it was surprisingly pleasant, enjoyably light, and genuinely friendly.

When I went back to Rockport to try on the shoes, I was lucky to have an Aussie-English co-shopper, who affirmed that, yes, these shoes would be good for winter. And I was luckier still that there was exactly one pair in the style I liked better left in my size.

After that came all the crap I started this piece with: the exhaustion and the stress of the six-supermarket fieldwork; the cheesy soundtrack at UCC; and the ugly realization that TGIF isn’t quite TGIF when you’re working on a Saturday.

Nevertheless, I’m happy. Light, agreeable, pleasant, at peace. I would even go so far as to use the word joyful. And I can't believe I'm saying this (and maybe my friends won't believe I'm saying this either, haha): it feels nice to be happy. It feels nice to be agreeable.

At first, I thought maybe this happiness sprang from starting the day with things I loved doing: shooting myself performing my audition piece, transcribing a piece of music, and writing for my blog. Or maybe from acquisitions, like the new shoes.

But I realize it’s much more fundamental than that. I could have been as bitchy with the waitress at Idea Italia as I was with those rude people at the airport. I could have taken out my annoyance with PAL on the Jolina-esque receptionist at Marriott. I could have stopped texting James right after he said he hadn't tried any new restos. But in each case, I didn't--and instead, let the happy energy from my music transciption, from my blogging on my Mac in the flight, and from my lucky taxi driver, carry me through the day.

Happiness simply springs from noticing, acknowledging, being grateful for, and being energized by life’s little gems. And this piece--long as it is--is about just one ordinary day's worth of these gems.

I think it's just a matter of whether we're letting ourselves look hard enough. In just one day, there’s really so much to see.