Here's to Long Family Lunches

I knew we'd have to endure the Saturday traffic given that the coding scheme was suspended and the truck-ban was off. We braved it anyway and went out of our way to Quezon City for lunch.

Thaipan described itself as a fine-dining restaurant, though it felt more mid-range. I came in my maong shorts and they didn't really impose on having me wear long pants or a dinner jacket. They were right about the place being "reminiscent of home." Even better, it genuinely felt like somebody who cooked well invited you to their home and served you lunch.

The place was quite literally, formerly someone's home. They refurbished and re-purposed the house. The bedrooms were turned into private dining rooms and the wide front lawn became an outdoor dining area. We had a good conversation around that as D. says it gives an aura of preserving a heritage, the way families pass on good values to their children.

D. lived in Thailand for about a year, and she's always a good judge of food that brings her back there. I suppose this one does. The aesthetics in the presentation suggest that it was carefully and expertly prepared. The servings are generous and it would have been awkward if you're out on a date and you were to finish the whole plate of pad thai or bagoong rice on your own. But it's perfect for sharing especially if you are a long-time couple who wouldn't mind maybe even eating it in the same plate.

The little one has also began to develop his own taste and palette. He's got something going on for some of the crunchy stuff and he voted for the Catfish Salad as his favorite. He warmed up to the spacious former lawn area.

The afternoon breeze was comforting so lunch was long, delicious and filled with conversation.

I suppose I mentioned the traffic earlier because it sparked a memory of how a few years ago, we didn't have to go very far for good Thai Food. A place called Sala Thai was in Malate for more than a decade. It had to close and was converted to another fast food joint. D. and I had several dates there years back, and it was some of the best food we've had together. We remember hearing the cook barking orders back to the well-dressed waiters, speaking to them in Thai. I even remember the how even the elegant utensils and table top cloths all look like they were imported from Thailand to keep the authenticity consistent.

Some of our other favorite Thai restaurants end up closing down. Suko Thai's another one. So it's probably why there's an ephemeral element about the experience in Thaipan. We would have wanted more restaurants to conserve the good-looking houses, the same way that families pass on the good values and preserve heritage. And we wouldn't want it to close down.

So yeah, fancy that we brave the traffic and ate there while we can.

The Best Bar in the World

The best bar in the world is our dinner table

Fiction lay along a bowl of chips 

and my wife's homemade salsa

seasoned lovingly 

using himalayan salt balanced with parsley leaves. 

There was no talk of sports, but my three-year-old tells me, "Drink your beer daddy" 

as he sings to Mickey Mouse clubhouse. 

We dance. 

When the little one was put to sleep, 

my wife and I have more conversation: 

familiar, spontaneous, honest and heedless 

as conversations of married couples go. 

We play some more music 

I'm my own DJ, dancing randomly 

to Talking Heads 

and Lyke Li 

and Up Dharma Down. 

We drink some more 

grocery-priced beer 

This price makes it tastier 

No service charge either

and I don't mind washing up a few dishes. 

And oh, the bed is so close 

for us to stagger silly on the way up. 

Why Fiction?

An exposure to what is unfamiliar makes us know who are: the more we lose ourselves, the more we discover ourselves. Travelling sets us up for that realization. We step away from our comfort zones to the wideness of the world, and to the true bounties of discovering the secrets of life in the universe.

 

This was a golden nugget that got laid as I read Jennifer Egan's "Why China?" in her collection of short stories, Emerald City. I paraphrased some of the sentences I liked. While the story induced it, the thought it is entirely mine. Reading does that to you. It challenges you to either figure out or build your own metaphor, write your stories, transcend what fascinated you in fiction to polish your persepctives, maybe even change your outlook, and entertainingly so.

 

Otherwise, the Eloquence of Sunday would have been Unexpressed

We drink at home, and moderately on a Saturday night, D and I. At our early thirties, hangovers are not only overrated, but are also a nuisance parents like us cannot afford.

By 4am on Sunday, I'm lacing up for a run. After a stretch, I stand outside for a minute, waiting for a GPS signal to lock in from satellites that orbit the earth. The watch flashes "go" like an answered prayer. Violet coaxes with the thickening blue of the sky and it's as if the streets are air-conditioned. 1.4km later, I'm at Roxas Boulevard and there's an organized race. I will have to accidentally crash this race. It has a "run to the beat" theme and the speakers blared wildly while my heart thumped fast against my rib cage. It's the closest I'll get to clubbing. For a moment, I was tempted to fist-pump to Swedish House Mafia.

I went 16k and stopped at the statue of a Raja Soliaman in front of the church. Not my best, and I even ran farther and faster just 2 weeks back, and farther and faster many years back. Between the years, I've gathered that true wisdom is to concede that you will not always be at your strongest.

The sweat from my scalp floods my face. My hands feel wet like like I just washed them. I'm being beaded beautifully in my own salt. That's enough to make me soar through this morning in high spirits.

Coming home from a Sunday morning run is always like finishing the Boston Marathon. Little I. is jumping up and down the bed, saying "Hi Daddy" in a screechy voice. We watch his shows or get started on reading while D. makes a prized breakfast. Today is zucchini omelet, sliced pears, and french roast cofffee with caramel cream.

Breakfast music pipes in and the little one specifically requests for happy music.We play the Spider Man theme performed by the Ramones, some Beatles, and nursery rhymes. I took mommy's hand for a waltz, and felt an even better kind of drunk when we danced.

"Can I dance too, Daddy?" The little one asks. We let the spoons, forks and knives rest as we close in a circle and dance. We eat some more, talk some more. The little one asks an ambitious "Can I play the piano mom and dad?"

It's only 7:30am. I fill the washing machine with the first batch of sorted, soiled clothes. In a while, I'd be looking at the clothes line arranged with whites, coloreds and darks. I'll be so thankful with how the sun shines so brilliantly.

De Saussure

De Saussure. They were introducing a new Executive Director and the familiarity of the name struck me. We went through the motions of introducing a new executive. In the conference call, while the invisible handshakes were extended, I was hung up on the bell his last name rang. Ferdinand De Saussure: father of semiotics, or structural linguistics (I'm going to have Google). How often was this name mentioned in my readings in post-structuralism.

De Saussure. The name threw my mind spinning in a whirlwind of philosophical wanderlust. What else have I forgotten? What can I still remember? How did I corrupt my little knowledge of Philosophy and applied it to my daily functions of my supposedly quiet and boring but truly stressful and unfulfilling job?

There must be a valid parallelism and a sensible coherence between Philosophy and Business Process Outsourcing in the 21st century. But I'm obviously just getting fancy and humoring myself. Both the Continental and Analytical Philosophers must be shaking in their graves.

In truth, my comparisons aren't accurate depictions and would actually be more like scrambled versions of real philosophy. In another time of my life I would have said, 'I should have been a librarian, or I should have been a scholar or philosophy professor.' It's dawned on me, with a less dreamy maturity, that in order to make living possible I have to chase some numbers instead of actually chasing a dream. It would have been useless to regret and sulk.

I did not meet some of the expectations I set earlier in life, but I surprised myself with so many others I didn't even imagine achieving. Being a father and husband, along with the discovery of a humble, blissful selflessness is probably my profoundest accomplishment in life. And maybe later on, I'll keep chasing those other dreams. I couldn't lose in this solution. I could still be all that one day, while I won't mind if I won't be.

I recently came across an article in The Atlantic, "Why hundreds of Harvard students are studying ancient philosophy."

I'd like to think that my choices are a result of foundations grounded in philosophy along with what I continue to learn now. Along with being a father and husband, I imagine that this not a regretful but a joyful wisdom. It is not with the grand narratives or most pompous events, but with the little incidents do we understand ourselves and 'turn the world with the palm of our hands.

This One for the Books

There is no smell

The sense of smell is often the most neglected of the senses. You cannot let your nose dive into the pages of an ebook and recognize how new it is based on the fragrant crispness of the paper. You cannot smell how cherished it is by the hands that held it for hours, nor trace the lingering hint of a flowery soap, coffee, or cigarette smoke. The physical books develop their own character by being tucked between the shelves, maturing with a distinct moldy smell. 

Virtual bookstores are a bore

No matter how hard the think tanks, marketing miracle workers and spin doctors think it, there is no virtual equivalent of stepping inside a bookstore, visiting a library or seeing someone's collection in their homes. There are millions of books available online. But it's not about quantity. It's about the resulting circumstances that lead you to books by way of the bookstores. That's a story in itself. Someone bought a Kurt Vonnegut from a second-hand bookshop in Kuala Lumpur. He gave his extra copy of Salinger's Nine Stories. He gave his Nietzsche volume which he bought from his student-job salary, the same edition returning to him by way of his future wife. Compared to what the reviews of online bookstore recommend, there's also a healthy randomness in chancing upon whatever is in the bookstore or what your friends recommend. Your next read sparked from real conversations. It's a smaller, more familiar sphere of influence that's less inhibited by advertising analytics. 

Save a few Pennies

I compared prices on some of my most recent reads.

A Visit from the Goon Squad costs PHP465.90 online when I got a decent paperback for PHP300 excluding the 20% discount. Kobo also sells the locally-published Manila Noir for PHP465.90 and I got mine for PHP299 excluding the 5% discount.

Jumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies would sell PHP463.68 online when you can get it for PHP145 at BookSale. Italo Calvino's Marcovaldo is discounted online at PHP379.69 but I got mine for PHP125 at BookSale.

On top of that, you have to buy an ebook reader. A decent one is around PHP6,000. And you'll have to pay for shipping costs and customs taxes if you buy directly from Amazon.

Reliability, Sentimentality and the Long Run

At the turn of the century, I've downloaded several ebooks and kept the files. They're now stored in an obsolete and already dysfunctional 20GB iPod color. I saved copies of the files, of course, which are now in unrecoverable, fried hard discs. Those turn-of-the-century ebooks are all burned, dead cells now.

On the other hand, the J.D. Salingers and Irvine Welshes, Douglas Couplands and F. Sionil Jose's books are standing the test of time and has moved from one hand to another, one shelf to another after having been taken to restaurants, the beach, parking lots, airports or wherever else. They contain very same words that glued my gaze. A lot has changed now, along with the ideas I concentrate on, but upon seeing these things and re-reading the words, I attribute to them - who I am now.

A few days ago, the news feed on my social media app told me that the last telegram in the country was sent.

Time is such a goon. To everything.

But it gets even more interesting. The last couple of months a major ebook brand partnered with the country's biggest Bookstore chain and I concede that it caught my fancy. It's affordable, it's convenient, and the technology is slick. The printed books, I feel, are also coming to their end. I thought I should accept that, move forward and adapt. So I tried to justify with a rather unbridled enthusiasm that I saw in what I wrote now.

What truly convinced me to stay with my books was just holding it, looking at the cover, or any other reason that's more profoundly sentimental than it is practical.

I'm an old man who sticks to his old chair, thinking Lazy Boys and massage chairs just can't hit the spot.