Ignorance is bliss.

At four, I thought that the Cheez Whiz fairy really lived beneath the Cheez Whiz bottle label (as suggested in their one TV commercial in the 80s).

As a child, I hated the gunky, sodium-laced pseudo cheese shit that is Cheez Whiz. Its plaster of paris consistency used to choke the devil off me in the mornings. Cheez Whiz was my yellow hell in a bottle. It was one of the things, alongside Triglob cough syrup and Johnson's cornstarch powder, that aroused the tantrums I keep behind my four-year-old head.

However, I recall feeling especially high-strung whenever my mother brings home a bottle of Cheez Whiz for my overweight sister and my father's macaroni-and-cheese midnight meal before the late-evening news.

This because of the Cheez Whiz fairy that lived beneath the bottle label.

I'd rip the label off each time and think: "She hides pretty well."

At six, I thought that Batibot was an actual place that my mother just could not locate with her car, despite the fact that she had the brains, ability and gas money to locate all the godforsaken Shoe Marts mushrooming in the metropolis.

And then I grew up to be nine and began realizing that Kuya Bodgie is too happy for a middle-aged man. My father yelled too much at thirty five. Kuya Bodgie must be faking it too well.

At twelve, I unlearned, gradually, the lies of special effects and the many fish stories of television.

And I learned not to trust and to hate and to stop believing.