Surprise Left

“Surprise Left” is a literal translation of the operative term in Filipino when you’re supposed to drive a girl home but you suddenly take a turn to a motel. Now I know I’m really being a Daddy, because the masculine of our species are supposed to un-strategically understand this crap from their fathers, who want them to live their own lives but make them realize somehow that it’s not a gentlemanly way to go about girls. And that we are never good-looking enough to break girls’ hearts.

What I gathered thus far is that when you become a Daddy you also suddenly and un-reluctantly increase your tolerance levels for corny-ness. You can’t keep a better, self-deprecating sense of humor because you need to mold yourself into a role-model for your child. So your humor is favored to be corny than self-deprecating. This self-consciousness is beginning to come out like a scrambled slice of pathological narcissism. What the fuck is all this for anyway? I’m hoping at the right time, you will read this and that’s the only time it will stop from being just another tree falling soundlessly in the forest that is cyberspace. Now there’s another bad, forced-upon metaphor!

Let’s go back to the Surprise Left now, before I completely digress. It’s Saturday, and we are overcome with a liberating feeling that accompanies most Saturday mornings. It’s the beginning of the weekend. I pick up D. in Ortigas and we enjoy cheap but well-prepared tuna or chicken croissants, iced coffee and grape juice. Engaged in conversation, we naturally weed out our work-related worries. We while away all other uncertainties all-too-easily because the imposing presence in a mother’s belly induces the courage to dream a little more.

That’s probably what drove us to this Surprise Left. I didn’t drive the girl straight home. But we also didn’t go to a motel, especially not now that I already knocked her up. We took a Surprise Left towards the Ikea Store, to order the Sniglar cot, the tastefully inexpensive crib.

And we took home the Lerberg shelf unit. After spending a year on the boxes, the DVD collection is finally out. Like the books, and the music, we want our child to eventually be exposed to what we thought was good. Everything from Studio Ghibli to the Kieslowski’s The Color Trilogy to The Godfather, Amelie, Dead Poet’s Society, History Boys and so on.

One day.



Now don’t be reductive and dismiss that it’s a consumerism-based fulfillment. It’s the feeling of assembling a Lerberg or a Sniglar with on your own hands and how many experiences will flourish on what you assembled. It’s where the Surprise Lefts take you.