I’M WRITING this on my phone, trying hard not to squint because my makeup artist Pidot said I shouldn’t wear my eyeglasses.
I’m gonna be a ninang in a wedding an hour from now and I’m already made up. It’s a pain, but there are things you just have to do.
Like makeup. I never liked that. It’s so confining, it’s too warm underneath those powder and creams and lipstick. But there’s a duty to attend, I sit and suffer.
It was easier in my younger years. Godparents of babies need not dress up and wear makeup. Baptisms are just about squalling babies. Weddings are something else. Weddings smell like hair spray mixed with squalling babies in the entourage.
But roles change, adding years to your age is part of life, and so, I sit still and behave, reminding myself over and over again not to eat my lipstick.
These are the norms that we live through, no big deal really. Just one of the ever-changing roles society imposes on us. It will not last a lifetime, anyway. After the ceremonies, life resumes its normal course but you have made a couple happy.
Tomorrow, a Sunday, I will be in my shirt and shorts again, face bare, having fun. Until the next duty calls.
“Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.” ~ Viktor E. Frankl