he's my photographer and more

sometime last may, i asked readers of this blog to suggest a topic for me to write about. as a response to my call, he gamely left this comment:

Hmmm.. topic?
Aha! How about make a story on what you think about me.
Wahahaha.. Shumatz! just kidding. =)

i haven't indulged him on this 'til now. kidding or not, here's my story of him...

to begin with, he is not the "nameless" him i assigned the name botchok to in one of my previous posts. he is not the him i refused to name. he is not the him who faded into the horizon. he is the him who took that photograph you see on this blog's "who's crawling?" box. he is the him who is my unofficial photographer. my miggs. actually, my kuya miggs.

i've known him for almost seven years now. i first met him when i was a college freshman and he, a college junior who was enrolled in the same undergraduate program i was in. i don't remember how our first ever conversation went because we didn't really become close oh-so-quickly. i'm sure, he doesn't quite remember our first encounter either. we both had this immature and snobbish air (still have, actually) that i'm sure prevented us from getting close right there and then.

the first one-on-one conversation we had that i could remember happened when i was a college sophomore and he, a college senior who only had a semester left before getting his diploma. it was the end of the first semester and we were killing time inside the rather smelly and ill-painted cramped room which we called our org's office. we talked and talked and we were a-laughing and a-chuckling in between. the very funny thing is: i don't exactly remember what we talked about. ding di ding! the only reason why i remember that conversation is that my greatest crush of all time happened to walk into the room while we were talking... to borrow a calculator. (kuya miggs, if you can recall this scene, then by now you already know who he-whose-name-i-cannot-tell-you is. don't be silly, i'm not talking about voldemort.)

it was a good thing kuya miggs was clueless of the temporary tension i felt in that room when i saw my crush so up close. you know that kind of feeling you get when someone you really like happens to stand in front of you and you're caught so unprepared you find yourself not knowing what to do, you even skip breathing for a moment? that was what i felt. kuya miggs did not have a clue. how could he when i even gave the 'welcome' intruder a brush off? had he known how things really stood then, his migginess might have shoved me into the chap's direction and instead of thanking him, i'd be throwing dagger looks at him for the rest of his life and you wouldn't be reading this post at all. ha ha ha.

before that, i used to see him only as his best friends' best friend and just another upper classman, not as who he really is. after that conversation, i got to know kuya miggs more and saw how multi-talented he is. apart from his physics-related abilities which are, by the way, already given, he can play the guitar, he can sing, he can draw, he can tweak the computer, he can write his own codes and is pretty capable of designing webpages. he is artistically inclined, very creative, and can really do quite a lot of things well, which includes writing out-of-this-world but entertaining stories. what more can i say? i'm a fan of the artistic and creative being in him and i'm mighty glad he makes it a point to share his works with me!


this picture tells a lot about how crazy he can be
when he gets carried away by his creativity
the him i got to know is a guy who's got immaturity and maturity combined in his system. his sense of humor and his reactions betray this kind of quality he has. i guess this is why we get along well. he is immature enough to be on my own "immaturity level" and he is mature enough to be one of my protective big brothers.

over the years, he turned out to be the big brother i could count on to rescue me from my bouts of boredom (and, maybe, insanity?), even now that we're many islands apart. he refers to me as a loyal textmate and i can say the same thing about him. in fact, he's not just a loyal textmate, he's my Y!M ghost. hehehe. it's quite amazing how we never really quite get on each other's nerves eventhough we argue a lot, eventhough he makes my celfone his rant board and i do the same to his own celfone, eventhough our Y!M windows get filled with each other's petty and not-so-petty complaints about life and every little thing we could pick on. sure, there may be times when we go "absent" on each other, but it doesn't really take so many days for one of us to eventually buzz the other to say, "oist, asa na ka? buhi pa ka?", "wala pa ko nimo na-miss? ana na ka?", or simply "hoist bam!". then we're back to arguing, ranting, complaining and still getting along well.

one thing i find so amusing with our friendship is this: whenever he finds me around, he'd nag me to buy him food -- banana cue or burgers or fries with drinks. being the "no" kind of person that i am, i usually don't give in and make my bratty ways work for me instead. i do my best at getting back at him by talking him into buying me whatever it is that he wants me to buy for him. i do this until he gives up making me buy his food -- that -- or until he ends up shelling out his money for the two of us. then, the next thing we know, we're buying food, munching, and talking while he is keeping an eye on all the ladies in the vicinity -- ladies who happen to be his favorite subjects for what i call his own brand of 'discreet photography'.

there are still a lot of things i could write about my kuya miggs -- like how he gets his way with his 'ladies' (it's safe to say i don't belong to this category) as well as his dreams for the society -- but my thoughts have gone from not-so-disorganized to disorganized and i'm quite sleepy already. i'm pretty sure he'll understand if i'll end this post here.