Monday, June 26, 2006

i now have a love/hate relationship with rain.

- i love waking up with rain outside my window. the roaring sound it makes is actually quite relaxing, plus the gloomy skies are a welcome sight after late nights. there's less sunlight to motivate me out of my bed, thus i snuggle deeper into my covers... also, psychology-wise, i sudddenly feel cool. i guess coming from pinas where the weather gets hot, rain can be a welcome change.
- speaking of pinas, rains usually meant no school. no school is always fun.
- i also had begun to love watching the trees sway and move with the strong gusts of wind. yes, even during typhoons. nature is an amazing sight to watch and truly a force to reckon with.
- i love walking/playing in the rain. childhood memories take me back to times i'd make boats and watch them go along the canals... then i'd play on a street nearby, where the water would cascade down to form pools. (of course, i'd take a bath after everytime i did this. my mom would not stand for me to be just dripping germs and all that)
- rain reminds me of the time of the Great Manila Traffic/Flood back in 96. got stuck in the road for 14 hours. being cramped up in the van with some friends. good conversations. eating lechon kawali and rice with our hands, then washing them later in the rain. walking around, going inside convenient stores, and surprisingly seeing familiar faces. it was actually fun.
- i love hiking in the rain. ok, i did this just once, but because hiking was a strenous exercise then, the rain calmed me. it made things a hell lotta slippery, but mud can be fun, too. haha, i'm weird.
- i love how the earth would smell - the freshly watered grass - after the rain.
- i even wrote a fiction (for an english class) involving the rain... with one hilarious result in particular.
- i love sipping hot soup or chocolate while its raining. mmmmmmmmmmm...

the comes the HATE. there's the fact that before and after the rain, i'd hear the frogs croak like they were this mad choir or something. i hate frogs. despise, loathe, detest them. but as long as i couldn't see them, i figured i was ok.

then came driving in the highways. absolutely HATE rain in the highways! i had the first experience of it in pinas, and it was my exam for my driving class! stick shift driving, to boot!!! can you imagine, driving along roxas boulevard and south superhighway - known as venues for some fast mad driving skills, plus reckless jaywalking. and all the while, you have an instructor in the passenger seat! it was a horrible position to be in, one wherein i was most painfully conscious of every single thing around me. how could you not be? i tried not to get myself and the instructor killed, keep the car in one piece, AND pass an exam at the same time.

omg. it is a memory that will always haunt me.

i was reminded of it again earlier. had another horrible experience. worse, i got caught in the evening... again! could hardly see anything. a truck would pass by, and there would be a huge splash of water covering the windshield for 2 seconds, and i'd pray for dear life that nothing would be in my path. the wipers are not fast enough against the onslaught of rain pounding the windshield. i'm always afraid the car would hydroplane (it never did, thankfully). another splash, this time to the side of my car, and i'd be jolted out of my concentration, just by the sheer force of it.

i'm now safely back in the house. sipping soup. i'm back to loving the rain again... that is, until the next time i drive in the highway.

*** UPDATE: at one point, i felt like Cher in the movie Clueless. totally paranoid in the highway scene. i wanted to laugh, if only i wasn't so afraid and busy praying.

0 comments // 7:57 PM