Interjections are part of our daily speech. They represent a particular culture, for example, in Filipino showbiz parlance, who’d have thought Ruffa Gutierrez coined the term “super duper” in the early to mid-90’s to every sentence unthinkable and made it our own. A hundred and one list goes on.
“Wow” easily dislodged my oft-expressed Pinoy two-word invective which has a ‘mother’ in it. To all those moralists, invectives are just it, spurs of the moment. When I came to the United States last May, wow became my byword and barely six months after and into the homestretch, it’s still my universal expression – never leaving my side. I am making a wow game for you.
Wow is/ wow isn’t…
- when you get a US visa and you realize only one out of ten people is ‘awarded’ to…(my rate isn’t accurate, just a guess)
- when your nationhood is put on a litmus test by the study of contrasts of what an airport looks like, e.g. Taiwan Int’l Airport’s massive and organized airport as opposed to NAIA’s…
- the inexplicable joy that you’re family is actually growing in number (having a niece and a sis-in-law), the memories you share and the sad irony of your mortality
- when friends and strangers gravitate towards you and lend your ear about life’s complexities and you intuitively feel that’s the one thing they need from you
- seeing little and big miracles open up to you, like seeing a moose trot in front of you on the highway when most people have not seen an elusive moose in their lives. Make that two moose sightings in one day!
- or when you visit a grand and majestic of a place and you instantly remember a dream several years back, a subliminal message slowly unravelling
- or when you recall a person, whether a friend or a stranger becoming your angel, who in the most dramatic and death-defying way said, (imagine her as the drunk pedicab woman-driver with you as the lone passenger traversing the dangerous and busy stretch of Roxas Boulevard) “nandyan lang ang mga pangarap natin” (“are dreams are only there to reach”); and after all is said and done, your dreams do come true
- when you have seen and touched the earth’s ‘creative pageantry,’ you just have to participate by honoring the earth…
- when you realize that wherever altitude you may be seeing a mountain, a coast, a harbor, an ocean or a river, they are the same thing, beautifully-created as ever
- when you’re on top of the mountain trail, can see the heavenly-reaching horizon and taught where the sun rises first in the whole East Coast.
- the awe when you first see the turning of maple trees, the signal of autumn.
- the details of the past and present, the pains and the joys, the secrets and fantasies that only an intimate friendship is shared with…
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