Mighty Mighty Delicious

We've taken Mighty Mighty along with us to several of quick-escape dinner or lunch dates and he always seemed glad to tag along. Breastfed exclusively since the day he was born, D. prepares expressed breast milk in a bottle so we can enjoy a lunch or dinner out while I. feasts on his. He's usually in a sling, a carrier or a stroller. The wait staff seem genuinely pleased to see I. And I say that because they have a non-artificial glow that light up like a 20% tip.

With our stomachs stuffed, our little family settles in a peace filled with protein, carbs, tastes, textures and conversation that make me say (without saying), "Let's do this all our lives."

We had crabcakes and a four-flavor pizza on our first lunch out with I. 3 months ago.

This evening took a little bit of a different tide. We're in a fairly pricey Steakhouse in Ortigas coming off the Halloween Trick or Treat in D.'s office. Our Mighty Mighty was clad in a Kimono, and later – he donned a statement Onesie that says "Rockstar" (the second costume a necessity because he had his goo all over the first one), Mighty Mighty was splurged with a lot of attention, never cried or went fussy. With all those compliments, we were very lucky parents.

Down at the Steakhouse, he was quiet as we start with the complimentary roasted nuts. We asked for seafood chowder, medium Long Iron steak along with mashed potatoes and grilled shrimp on the side.

On the table to our left, four girlfriends in office uniforms munch on nachos and Buffalo wings, and across us I see an old foreigner having a beer. The place was dimly lit, and the wait staff was all chipper and looking extra proactive as though their blood ran on Red Bull.

Mighty Mighty started to cry, and he wouldn't stop crying despite all of D.'s proven formulas that would normally settle him. Mighty wouldn't stop crying and it was quiet all around so it was mostly him that everyone hears. Despite our hunger and sleeplessness we didn't exaggerate the panic as it applies to this situation. We got the look from customers but nobody confronted us. For a moment, I prepared with how I might remind anyone who have dared. I would have said, “this is Ortigas, not New York.” For the first time since we became parents, we knew it was happening.

D. took our Mighty Mighty outside where a Korean lady who also dined at the restaurant saw him in his tantrum. The lady asked if she can carry our baby. D. resolutely said no.

We smiled politely and softly said sorry to the wait staff, having our order to-go instead of eat-in. And off we went, homebound in a rush-hour. I. slept in the car. We talked about how D.’s officemates adored our Mighty Mighty, and how I. kept on staring at another kid’s The Flash outfit.

D. didn’t need to tell me that pretty soon he will be insisting that we go to Jollibee. I also thought, that wouldn’t be bad at all. I thought, Chickenjoy, Palabok Fiesta, and how even self-service sounded like an oxymoron because it’s actually more convenient.

We got home rather quick and Mighty Mighty. was soothed and smiling again. We spread the take-out in our home dining table and chewed on the soft, pinkish meat. It’s delicious.

Less than an hour earlier, we were being devoured by something like embarrassment. Neither us of us snapped. Being eaten up like that for the first time, we must have been just as delicious.

Two More Books and 124 Days of I.

How I stumble upon the time to read is a sort of a low-level miracle. It’s like discovering you had a stash of money you thought you didn’t have anymore.

Aside from Miguel Syjuco’s Illustrado and Martin Amis’ The Rachel Papers, I managed to tuck in two more books to the shelves over the past couple of months. Those were Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and Italo Calvino’s Marcovaldo or Seasons in the City. I bought both of these from BookSale, where book-buying need not be profligate, and buying itself is a cheap thrill. While they aren’t as nasally pleasant as the freshly-printed copies in more expensive bookstores, the joy of finding them amongst straight-to-the-bargain-books is an unmatched, unexpected happiness. And these copies are in mint condition.


I’ve been reading these books with I., and even D. admits to having a childlike sense of wonder and anticipation in hearing the stories. Both these books were a wild ride, and reading them and enjoying about them together as a family is like going on a trip to Disneyland.

I imagine that the beautifully simple language where a mirage of flatness masks the deeply ingenious stories would sound familiar to I. We read Italo Calvino to him when he was in the womb. I’m making excuses now, but when I find the time I’ll write down a full inkwell of thoughts around Life of Pi.

My guess is I will find the time. I’m saying that because since our I. was born, I had it all, including some of the things I thought I’d lose. In 124 days of I.’s being-in-this-world, he grew and grew and cooed and cooed.

And I understood why I should long, even more intensely, to repeat the last 124 days and the twenty-nine years of my life. Because in some parallel universe, I.’s fond smiles are flashing again, I am hushing him again, telling him stories of the lower-class Italian families in the 50s and 60s, or shipwrecked Indian Boys in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. I am listening to music with him again. I am watching him sleep with his D. in the morning, or watching him sleep with mama before I leave for work at night, making my woes vanish into thin air. I. is staring wide-eyed into me again, and we peer into each other’s souls.

In truth, I didn’t just manage to read two other books in 124 days of I.’s being-in-the-world. In the selfless pace of the past four months, everything seemed to have happened. A few days back, I ran my second 21k this year (in a borderline-decent 2:10 finish). I have two serious offers for a promotion that would double my basic income. I recently had two articles published in a respectable online music/culture magazine (getting paid made me feel like a legitimate writer). I’ve gained a few pounds, but I’ve given up smoking entirely. I have spent a lot of time with my families – my own, my parents, and in-laws.

In having I. I have bowed, as I am humbled and selfless, I have to trust in something greater than myself. Much to my relief, I jumped into the abyss feeling more awakened. I have knelt in prayer to God, thankful for the happy arrangement where I arrived amidst all the inscrutable order or chaos.

In scaling myself down, my life fled to an upward trend.

More or Less Enlightened

It’s been the new buzz novel. It’s all over the bookstore window-displays and it’s selling like pancakes. It’s been heralded, awarded the Asian Man Literary Prize before it was published, and flanked with the expected accolades. The publishers even decided to release it in time for the May 2010 elections as a cheap marketing tactic under the guise of helping the voting public become "enlightened."


Not to mention how it’s so cool, you want to be seen reading it, preferably in an overpriced, overrated place like Red Mango or Golden Spoon where a paper-bowl of frozen yogurt is within your easy reach.

Now, the novel possesses that character. It tempts you into finding something flawed with how it was executed or fallacious with how its logic was formed. I tried, and while its imperfections are not so endearing, this local read made a significant leap. It’s the kind of novel that leaves an indelible imprint in your mind. I would have paid more than PHP 298, if not for the poor binding as my copy started to have its pages lose and unglued.

The narrative approach and the ambitiousness reminded me so much of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz). Only, Junot Diaz was more subtle in his transition from a third person to a first person narrative somewhere in the middle of the novel. Now that’s an unimposing technique with a lofty goal that’s surgically and stylishly achieved. Miguel Syjuco seemed to have gone firing away with all the styles he learned in Ateneo and Columbia: he had everything from blogs, poetry, excerpts from a novel-within-a-novel, fictitious newspaper clips, aphorisms, first person narration, and third person narration all in one broth less a cohesive balance. It’s a heavily spiced dish that doesn’t seem to want you to get bored. The novel had grandiose dreams, and it thrown a lot of ammunition, weapons of mass destruction if may - to hit the target.

The novel succeeded in keeping me from getting bored – especially with the serialized ice breakers of Erning Isip to Boy Bastos. It’s a good development in a story, humorously stereotyping what happens to our culture once it’s homogenized into American culture.

As I leisure my way into so many of the writing styles, I pause to cherish some of the most tasteful phrase formations: toothlessness of exile, mellifluous rhetoric, the pawn making a final sprint to queenhood, having a child as a grand gesture of optimism in this world. I repeatedly read some portions of this book because it sounded so good and it was so cerebrally delicious:

“In those years, young Salvador witnessed the benefits that his father’s position in the collaborationist government provided their family, and he experienced and swallowed, for the first time in his life, the alluring palatability of necessary hypocrisies." P.149

The most moving piece was on the character Mutya Dimatahimik’s story on p.204. During a Marcos-era protest demonstration, a poet, who was five months pregnant, lies in front of an advancing tank. In the page after he went on about Seamus Heaney’s “No lyric has ever stopped a tank” and ranks that act alongside the efficacy of literature or poetry. Perhaps I was touched that deeply because D. was in her third trimester of pregnancy when I read the book back in May.

Miguel Syjuco writes with an impressive versatility and authenticity. The dialogues sounded real and unpretentious as though he had the inside scoop. The cono kids really sounded like cono kids who went to Pravda, talking like “Dude, you have?” You knew this author was for real right from page 1, when he chose to have the character wear Ermendegildo Zegna trousers and you easily surmise that he’s wearing a pair, himself.

The level of specificity to substantiate both characters and the advocacy was in some parts laid out nicely:

"Together, Madison and I moaned about how CNN had stopped calling it Communist China, except during negative new stories about lost American jobs or consumer safety violations."

Fearlessly and precisely, he went on to satirize the character of Filipino writers as well as the state of Filipino writing.

What is Filipino writing? Living on the margins, a bygone era, loss, exile, poor-me angst, postcolonial identity theft. Tagalog words intermittently scattered around for local color, exotically italicized. Run-on sentences and facsimiles of Magical Realism, hiding behind the disclaimer that we Pinoys were doing it years before the South Americans, and every short story seems to end with misery or redemptive epiphanies. And variations thereof. An underlying cultural faith in Deus ex machina P. 207

He knew the traps he should avoid. He didn’t give in to, and even exposed the pretentiousness of the Philippine literati. Filipino writers always seem afraid to criticize themselves because they’re all friends, celebrating and congratulating themselves in a debt-of-gratitude, scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours culture.

These are the literati of the Philippines: the merry, mellowed stalwartly middle-class practitioners of the luxury of literature in the language of the privileged. Many of them are former Maoists. p.161

The trap he didn’t avoid, however, was the dream of having the novel become some kind of modern-day Noli Me Tangere. It appeared as though he wanted to write an expose-book that will move the nation to revolutionary progress. But while it’s a good story, he didn’t really tell us anything new to wake us up from our national amnesia.

Characters in a novel often give biased and condescending judgements that are not reflective of the author’s views. But a novel’s conscious/unconscious attempt to lean towards an agenda over the other to make it come out in a more favorable magnitude is clearly a message that an author sends out. For example, Miguel Syjuco made himself out to be a schoolist, as he champions Ateneo as some kind of elite utopia. He bashes other schools from AMA to La Salle to UP. The arrogance was an uncalled-for low-point.

I often imagine if successful writers regret some of what they have written. I play on to imagining that this writer probably regrets adding too many of his fantasy chicks in this novel to the point of sounding homophobic. More importantly, he may have left out a certain character undeveloped as though he didn’t have the ending clear in his mind.

And I’m probably wrong. Because endings are virtually non-existent in so-called postmodern novels such as Illustrado.

You just go on talking about it.

A Movable Monument

All traffic enforcers who flagged down the vehicle I was riding (whether I was the one or someone else who was driving) have made a sinister attempt to collect a bribe. They weren’t always successful – because drivers end up dropping names or flashing calling cards or IDs that eventually make the driver involved in the insidious intent. I once told one of them that I worked in ___ (a private company/call center) and surprisingly they just let me through despite my “violation.” The most ghastly, ironic one I heard was from a Pasay Traffic Enforcer: “Para sa bayan naman itong ginagawa natin eh,” as he pockets two hundred.

I drive around those easy-driving areas and I see traffic officers flag down the vehicles (perceivably for that purpose) on a daily basis.

They usually hide themselves like landmines, setting up traffic traps where motorists can easily commit a petty violation on areas where accidents or even traffic jams are not likely to occur. The most common of these vague traffic violations would be “swerving.” You also usually find the “abangers” on rerouted areas where there’s a new “No Left Turn” sign installed in a corner where they previously allowed vehicles to turn left.

Obviously, it disgusts me and I am always at fault in mocking them and their protruding bellies.

With a President who preferred no special treatment on traffic rules, stopping at red lights and being stuck in bottlenecks just like the rest of us, it makes this country a very exciting country to live and drive in.

I drive around an easy-driving area every day, but you have to Schumacher your car over the traps the enforcers set up.

There’s a different sight in the busy EDSA Extension-Macapagal intersection. A traffic enforcer apparently takes on the less travelled route.



I recognize him: burnt, sun-exposed skin, bug-eye shades, white gloves, a thin frame from so much movement. I saw him up close when he filled a gallon of water from a nearby gas station.

He’s there, nearly everyday, in the blazing heat of the 9am sun, or doused in a drizzle, and always blown off by the carbon monoxide emitted by so many mufflers. I recognize him directing the traffic with the demanding labor of moving the entire length of your arms, dancing your body around the four corners of the intersection, risking your life to being swiped by buses or twelve wheelers. Watching him in his human kinetic, dancing around and directing so many vehicles is like seeing a statue of Rizal perform a nation-building deed. More than any bribe, the satisfaction he gets must be pricelessly fulfilling.

It’s a sight of a movable monument physically and dynamically becoming a living testimony of unsung heroism. I say that that because that is what I saw today. For all I know he’d be flagging me down and extorting me tomorrow. This may not be a logical deduction but since no extortion happened, I’ll stick to the better story.

In doing what he does, I imagined how many accidents he’s prevented, how many people he’s kept honest, or how many perceptions he’s changed. How many like me, who’s excitedly on his way home to his wife and child, brings up a hand and points an index finger to the edge of the brow, saluting him for the hero that he is as I turn left - following the many gestures of those white gloves to lead my way home.