The Legend of the Uichanco Twins

One side of my family has the type of last name that you know only your relatives can have. Meaning if someone has it, you’re related to that someone for sure.

And no, it’s not Zobel De Ayala, dang it. But Uichanco’s good enough for me. :)

1980s Uichanco heads

Lately, my Tita stumbled upon an Unfamiliar Uichanco online. I was unofficially assigned (i.e. Mom made me kulit) to get in touch with her, to ask her who her parents are, because we were all going “WTF? I’ve never heard of her!” And not having heard of a Uichanco is, in itself, unheard of. We’re currently still waiting for a response, hoping we didn’t scare her off.

You might think this is incredibly self-centered of us to assume we “own” the name, so to speak, but really we do! I’m aware it is possible we’ve just lost track of all the members of our huge “clan.” But there is one reason this is kind of more intriguing than it should be:

There is a Legend that’s been thrown around the family dinner table more than once before. And so the lookout for unknown Uichancos has always been quietly going on.

Why don’t you lean back, sit comfortably around the campfire in front of the monitor and let me tell you the story.

Submitted to the approval of the Midnight Society, I call this story:
The Tale Legend of the Uichanco Twins

Legend has it that generations ago there were male Uichanco twins. For some reason, they just could NOT get along. Whether it was a feud between the twins, or between one twin and the rest of the family, I’m not sure. Either way, it got so bad that that the one twin left the house and never looked back, never talked to the family again. [cue collective *gasp* from audience]

Now according to Legend, we are the descendants of the left-behind twin. And the Unfamiliar Uichancos are descendants of the other.

This means that there is a whole ‘nother side of our clan that we have never met before! A whole lot of family members we don’t actually know!

[cue: X-Files theme song]

Like UFOs, there have even been rumored sightings! Not of the people themselves but, you know, of some kind of document that said something related to an Unfamiliar Uichanco. Some have said they’ve seen it in UP Diliman, a province in the Visayas… Some have even mentioned Australia.

Will the Unfamiliars and us ever meet again? Will there be a reunion between the separated twins’ families, several generations later?

That’s a secret I’ll never tell.

XOXO,

Gossip Gi–WAIT. Wrong show.

…

Forget it.

The truth to the Legend, we’ll never know for certain now. But, one must say as a member of this family, it is a pretty cool story.

So while we’re waiting for a message back from the recently stumbled-upon Unfamiliar Uichanco, I wonder — What’s your favorite Family Legend? :)

Confinement

Guess where I was the past week.

GUESS!

I'm doing the Mary-Kate pout-thing here.

In case you couldn’t tell by the strategically placed hand pose to show off the needle sticking into the side of my wrist, I, folks, was at the hospital. It was only about 3 days (?) — I don’t know, I lost track of the time — but it felt like FOREVER.

Now, the hospital was great. The staff — the nurses, the doctors, even the dudes who brought in the meals to the rooms — were surprisingly courteous, and friendly. It was odd, but a wonderful change from the usual masungit nurses.

(And here I’d like to take time to thank the nice nurses. And hope they don’t ever tire of being nice. Having a lot of nurse friends myself, I’ll say here that I hope you guys don’t ever ever become one of those horrible, masungit nurses and know that friendly nurses do make a positive difference in someone’s boring hospital stay. :) )

The one thing bugging me was that THERE WAS NO CABLE TV. It’s bad enough already that I had to miss internet access those days, but they didn’t even have cable! My sickness wasn’t fatal, but given a few more days, the cable-less TV was what would have killed me for sure. I was stuck with a staticky ABS-CBN the whole time — it was the only channel the lowly antenna could get. And I forced myself to watch an hour of doubled-vision GMA for Bubble Gang.

This was because it was a new-ish hospital. It was so new, they haven’t even subscribed to cable yet. Gahh. (And I’m gahh-ing because that last sentence was constructed strangely like a bad yo momma joke.)

So, because I didn’t have an iPod like all the cool people do, my mom brought this cheap-ass-but-functional FM radio we had lying around the house so we’d have some background sounds other than Willie Revillame screaming into the mic annoyingly (Wowowee!!!). And my book-of-the-moment to keep me company. When there’s no TV or internet, books and music are a worthy alternative, I’d think.

"Pensonic" radio LOL / Neil Gaiman <3

One more thing worth mentioning, with its plus points for some redeeming value, is the view. My room had a gorrrrgeous view from its teeny tiny window:

actual pic of Gorgeous View -- Mt. Makiling, I think

Except — of course there’s a catch! — I would have had to get up and walk to the other end of the room to see it.

But now I’m free from my “hospital prison with the friendly prison guards.” And now I have cable (and internet!!!) again.

And oh yeah, I came out of it alive.

Yay!

My palm was read.

…and she said a few interesting things.

I highlight (and paraphrase) my favorite “prediction”:

You’re not going to have a kid… Not in the near future. But, I’ll tell you, when you do, [the first one]’s going to be a boy. He’ll take more after you than after the father though. And he’ll be the musician in the family.

Now I’m not the type to take fortune-telling seriously at all, but come on, a musician son would be cool! I realize that My Friend The Palm Reader said “musician,” not necessarily synonymous to “rockstar.” But let’s pretend it’s the same thing.

I, Jewel Angeles, am going to spawn a rockstar son. Woot! \m/