Drinking Life Deeply

The upside to getting married out of town is that many of our preps and requirement-fulfillments turn out to be small-scale, quiet excursions. This is, after all, the making of our lives as a truly blissful trip.

The most recent trip was our Pre-Cana Seminar in Caleruega. The drive to Tagaytay was pleasant – around 2 hours including a brief breakfast stop in a coffee shop along the way. We sipped Dark Cherry Mocha in the car with a blend of contradiction in an all-too-commercialized red cup. It pumped some holiday cheer to our veins, but it also came with self-reproach for patronizing a company who may have disadvantaged coffee farmers in Ethiopia. We can only wish that our future marital arguments would be restricted to mundane matters such as these.

Back to the trip now, before we complete digress. Being in Caleruega again reaffirms our decision to get married here – the view of Mt. Batulao is spectacular, the flowers are in bloom, and you slip into an instant transformation towards serenity and sincerity. We half-expected the seminar to be a bookish refresher on The Seven Sacraments, along with an awkward sex-education/family planning forum with other couples who will also get married soon. We were too happy to prove ourselves wrong. Caleruega’s parish priest conducted an excellent and effective seminar which even came with entertaining bits. Priests like him make you extra proud of the Holy Orders: Father had a profound knowledge of the Canon Law, a sense of humor, gardening skills, conversational skills, a genuinely hopeful disposition towards would-be couples, a laptop, and (if J. sees it right) - Oakley prescription glasses.

So that’s Why Miracles are Made

D.’s favorite bit was when the priest encouraged us to come back here in the future, to have retreats as a family or as a couple and look back to the wonderful experience of Holy Matrimony. She imagined herself and her family, here, in the future. J.’s favorite bit was when the priest noted how the first miracle of Jesus was to turn water into wine during a wedding. Miracles are made, he thought, so we can have swig and drink life deeply.

After the seminar, we had booked the venue for our wedding preps. Logistically, it’s the perfect place - being a few minutes away from the chapel. The golf-course views would make a scenic background. The surroundings are peaceful and relaxing and the Presidential Suite would have enough room for us and our parents. (Thank you to Best Man Lloyd for another worthy recommendation).

Ferment Your Own Yogurt

We had a late lunch at a Greek restaurant along the Tagaytay highway called Mano's Greek Taverna. It was late in the afternoon, the weather was cool and we were famished. A hearty Moussaka was called for. The restaurant set-up was simple in its blue and white. It’s an elegant simplicity that avoids the formulaic concepts of overpriced shopping-mall restaurants. A family picture of Manos, who owns and runs the place, hangs in one of the walls. He himself was there serving salad with feta cheese to his guests, even guiding cars in the parking lot. We overhear him boasting, “we bake our own bread, we ferment our own yogurt, import the virgin olive oil, make our own patties, everything has no chemicals, no preservatives, no vetsin, no mantika.” We went yummy yummy yummy and ha ha ha.


We once saw how Greek coffee was made in Travel and Living. They use percolators but we couldn’t remember if the sugar was thrown in with the powdery Arabica. But we're confident that no Ethiopian farmers were harmed in its making. Greek coffee was delicious. There we were – J. and D., - drinking life deeply.

One more stop for our parent’s pasalubong - those assorted (pineapple/buco/mango/ube) tarts. And we’re off home from another blissful trip.

A Coffeeshop Commercial

"Ah, look at all the lonely people."

- The Beatles in Eleanor Rigby

Now, that entry is precisely the kind of coffeeshop whining people ramble and write about when they're out by themselves.

I, Forget

“…I was always bursting with vanity. I, I, I is the refrain of my whole life.”

- from “The Fall” by Albert Camus

The nearness of December arrives with a wave of depression. This depression is a less familiar one, one that takes a retreat to writing.

D.’s Qatar project at work is seemingly insurmountable, and that’s just on top of the most intricate details she’s patching up for the wedding. We didn’t have that much disposable income or financial resources. It scares me to think of what people expect, that no matter how carefully we decide there will always be wicked tongues nagging.

The world doesn’t always repay kindness in equal terms.

My pledge was to keep a positive outlook for D. I want to take all her sadness, all her worries, and make them mine alone. I want her to continue to think that the wedding is a beautifully conceived process. I’m probably not helping with that recently. Sometimes all my meddling with the details makes everything twice as difficult.

All of a sudden, I ran out of positive scripting for myself. In this moment of weakness, my zeal to stay optimistic simply waned.

This sadness is a reminder and a remainder of my selfishness. Because I’m thinking of myself again. You’re only lonely when you think of yourself. Specifically, if you think of yourself alone. When you remember that you are that lonely island. I have to make D. happy
because my own happiness is hers.

Overcoming selfishness is a lot of overcoming. There’s just going to be a lot more trepidation, embarrassment – if I tell D. that I no longer think of myself solely. She’ll probably just laugh that off.

All this selfishness and sadness took on a different degree when I ran this morning. Running in my own homemade void makes me think clearly. During December, I even expect an air of holiday cheer to brush against me. But with all other things I couldn’t remove from my mind, this morning’s run was just a sad waltz with the wind.

One selfish thing begets another. It looms you further into your own infernal circles. You’ve got to snap out of it before you drown.

Some writers and some existentialists are in their own form of self-absorption, the kind that results to poor fiction or lousy philosophizing that ultimately denies truth, reality, aesthetics and
life-affirmation. If it were coffee it would taste nothing but artificial. When you’re drinking it, you know, none of it is real. Strawberry fields. Nothing is real.

I understand it now. You are just the loose change you rummage in your pockets. Forget your leftover self.

The Road Towards 2.22.2009 is 222 km long

'All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing.'

- Haruki Murakami, What I talk About When I Talk About Running

While I lavish her with love, D. understands that I'm not exactly a spendthrift. In fact, I'm leaning towards the opposite side of spendthrift. I wanted to squander on a pair of running shoes but felt guilty about chipping off the small amount that we just saved up for the wedding at that time. As my giver of meaning and everything I've always wanted, D. wrapped a pair of Nike Air Max last Christmas and gave it to me.


That paved a lot of new roads. For one, I discovered a way to make metaphors physical. Borrowing from Haruki Murakami, running lets me create my own wonderful, homemade void - where D. jumps along and joins me occasionally. Literally, of course, I'm running the roads - bay sides, hills, boulevards, and even cemeteries where you hear nothing but your own huffing and puffing and souls just humming you on (preferably with something like Wolfgang's Cathedral of Space blasting through the iPod).

While I think I've had some wins in life (D.being my most beautiful win), I'm used to losing and accepted it as a recurring theme. When I can't win, I thought I could aim for learning, losing gracefully, and moving forward. Running put all that in a refreshing new light. The focus is not centered on winning or losing but in defeating yourself. That comes when you learn to deal with your own adversity. That happens when you're able to command a cramping body to go farther or faster. Like what our beloved Haruki Murakami says: 'Exerting yourself to the fullest within your individual limits: that's the essence of running, and a metaphor for life - and for me, and for writing as well.'

I'm fantasizing that someone (other than D.) is actually reading this and you're probably asking now, what's this have to do with the wedding? The answer is: this is our wedding path. This is all about the building of the wedding's metaphors - physical or otherwise. This is the road we are in now. So I'm going to make a run for it.

Two-hundred twenty two kilometers (222 km) before our wedding date, February 22, 2009 (2.22.2009). The 222 km road towards 2.22.2009 starts August 31, 2009 when I completed my first 10k in the Nike Human Race (where 60 year old folks and 12 year old girls zipped past me). But at least I finished the race, got free dri-fit socks, the finisher's bracelet, and Nike had to donate to Unicef.

...

By the way, I finished the 10k in 1 hour and 8 minutes, ranking 142nd in the Philippines, 24,584th in the world.

222 km is equivalent to a little over four full marathons. Of course it's something that a more serious runner could easily accomplish in less than 5 months, but I'm just a novice runner who had to count on his girlfriend to buy him a pair of running shoes.

This is for D. This all started with you and you are with me every step of the way.

Our Last Summer as Boyfriend and Girlfriend

Capones Island with Secondary Sponsor and friend-for-life H.

Although the editing was done by H. using a Mac Powerbook, all the still and moving images in this video were captured by a now-Jurassic Nokia 6233. The resolution's on the low side, but the dreaminess is soaring high on the scale.

We once gave H. a birthday card with a Jack Kerouac quote, 'Happiness consists in realizing that this is all a strange dream.' It's how we honestly felt as we watched the video. We had such a blast on our backpack in that island - it almost seemed just like a strange dream.

We got re-acquainted through H. four years ago. And there we were, on our last summer trip as boyfriend-and-girlfriend. So it goes.

Right now, we hear the rain falling hard on tin roofs, accompanied by that perfect-for-the-weather song from the video. Jon Brion sings Here We Go. We exchange i-love-yous and imagine that by next summer, we will be husband and wife.

For You I'd Bleed Myself Dry

A few years back, we used to hang out a lot in this Makati Ave. bar that didn't have chairs. You sat down on the floor with your shoes off. They played a little house, some chillout and ambient. They served wine, beer and the whole lot of the North Park Menu. One of those night-outs when we tried to forget all the grinding pressures of our jobs, she took out a band aid - one of those mediplast ones you used tape your skin with when you had bruises after playing Black 1, 2, 3. She took a pen out and wrote an inscription at the back of the band aid, 'For you I'll bleed myself dry.' And in our minds, Coldplay's guitar chorus riffs made a blissful sonic blast, love bubbling up all over, with Chris Martin's voice almost weeping we were just so happy.

Reduced to wordlessness, he then confirmed then and there: this is the girl I'm going to marry.