Nothing is Real

After the highways and the ascent through zig zag roads, a city pops up in the mountains, evenveloped in fog, unfolding right before your eyes. The afternoon sky bursts with colors gleaming on the greens of the mountains until it cools down to the early evening's grey. It's like a visual equivalent of a Sigur Ros song.  We close in and see houses, gas stations, pasalubong stores and the rest of a bustling city sprawled in a row of hills. Baguio is an urban dwelling among the clouds, the traffic heavily congested in some parts but the strawberry fields close by.

Nothing is real, it sings to you.

IN MEMORY OF BUGGERS

This city is capable of building the strongest connections in your psyche. These mountains hold and mold some of the firmest memories. It’s a collective childhood recollection:  getting dizzy at the zig-zag roads, bike or boat rides at Burnham Park, posing with the Igorots in Minesview, pine trees, jars of Good Shepherd ube or strawberry jam and sundot-kulangkot.

When I was a kid travelling up here, my father drove us himself. It must have been lot more difficult to navigate, let alone drive these roads back then. My mother being my mother, all three of us (I think even my cousin) were all in matching yellow Camp John Hay vests.

This is where you take those pictures.

You spend a good part of your life wanting to be the kid in those pictures again. Repetition longs and desires itself.

FARM-TO-MOUTH STRAWBERRIES

This trip was also the Panay crowd's annual meet and H.'s 32nd, Baguio-style. The couples with kids stayed in hotels, while the rest camped in F.'s place. Only a few years back, D. & I were drunken-ice-skating with F., having vodka jellies at 8 am, among other fond memories. Nowadays, we do wholesome cookouts, play Monopoly, and finish the drinking before 1am while the kids are in another room playing Nintendo Wii.

We had dinner the first night at a Japanese place called Chaya, a house-turned-restaurant where the tables were few and the kitchen was open and literally homey. The floors and high ceilings were wooden. There's a fireplace, a huge couch, and a piano. The chef-owner was Japanese and you find a curious warmth in a place that served complimentary green tea ice cream.

After touring the BenCab museum the following day, we had lunch at the museum's cafe. All the rice meals had the organic mountain-grown brown rice of Cafe Sabel, paired perfectly with cucumber coolers or lemongrass iced tea.

On the third day, we had lunch at Le Chef at the Manor in John Hay. "A Christmas tree place." P. called it. It’s December, and their Christmas tree was a real pine tree. Their garden had a playground where I.  insisted on playing in his make-believe train for over an hour.

Little P. and our little I. picked strawberries at the La Trinidad Farm in Benguet and we'd like to think this is the trip's highlight. We rinsed them with water from our bottles and ate them literally on the fields where they grew, so they were farm-to-mouth. We all had strawberry taho - the pang-instagram taho, as the slick taho vendor in sunglasses dubbed it, encouraging us to hashtag and become a follower.  

THE SEARCH ONLY APPEARS COMPLICATED

It took me sixteen years to climb up here again. The last time was when a National Convention sponsored us (the geekiest boys and girls) up here for 5 days. I formed part of the school Debate Team (led by H.) that made it to the finals. All of us were no taller than 5”5. How cute it was – an exclusive-for-boys Catholic school with a rowdy reputation versus an exclusive-for-girls Catholic school mostly from upper middle class families who were reputed to be smarter than us. All the young ladies of their debate team probably stood taller than 5”5. We debated the abolition of pork barrel in Congress and our school’s team won, mostly because of H. ‘s arguments and pre-conceived counter-arguments that we all rehearsed.

On the day we won the debate, among the audience were three other classmates who became my friends for life. Also among the audience was a young lady who was voted to be the convention’s National Vice President (the popular and intellectual equivalent of second head cheerleader), whom I married 13 years later. 

Here we all are, again, now. H. is completing his Ph.D in Berkeley. B., who won the convention presidency at the time, has been shuffling back and forth Manila, Melbourne, and South America with his Canadian astronomer-wife. We did not speak of it, but we are celebrating so many other wins as we sipped coffee sweetened by muscovado in the old Café by the Ruins. What we did speak of, was the weather and the wine in Santiago, Chile, triathlons in Melbourne, and a Filipino and his Canadian wife’s search for Argentina Corned Beef in Argentina.

I shared that I heard a story about a friend of a friend who looked for The French Baker in France. 

HIGH-ALTITUDE RUNNER'S HIGH

If we lived here, my favorite thing would be how the weather makes running outdoors conducive at any time of day. The towering trees, the clean pine scent (or the pollution) and just spotting a interesting-enough place for lunch or dinner during your run makes the uphill dares worth taking. Drunk the previous night, M. and I decided to head out for a run at 10am, but it still felt like running at 6am. 

We decided to follow the running route of Manny Pacquao, except that I imagined it to be in Lake Drive, while M. thought it was up in Camp John Hay. We lost track of each other somewhere around Session Road. So we were on separate paths, but must have felt the strange, laughable relief in knowing that we both got a little lost. I ran 5.5 km at a slower than usual pace, having to walk or stop at the crowded sidewalks. As I lost my way I discovered how so much of Baguio has also deteriorated, has been overcrowded and polluted.  But nevertheless, it’s a path you’d want to run again. 

On the way back, I saw M. a couple of meters away from the hotel. Inevitably, We head out at the same time, we both get lost, and he was right there exactly at the time to go home. 

Shallow Afternoons

There's three of us
into eternal sunsets
afternoons asleep

Afternoons like this I’m so happy I’m being shallow. I’m being overly self-conscious. A pseudo-profound side of me crusades against this shallowness and retaliates with that haiku that appears eloquent when (and only when) you’re drunk.

Yes, we were drinking. After work in the evening, we had lunch out in a decent-enough Greek restaurant. Lamb gyros with tzatziki sauce in wheat pita. The place had a huge blackboard with the day’s specials and a large “Opa” in Greek letters. The little one was his stroller and I’ve already started with beer. I look at D. and remember all our dates and the countless times I told her I love her and her cooking and her tastes.

We went home and the little one lets us watch movie. I drink some more, maybe three or four. The engaging movie takes us to Genova, an Italian medieval town with charming alleyways. It rode us to nearby ports, beaches, coasts where you scoot along roads with a view of waves crashing against cliffs.

We are in this room and this room is a shoreline. The sun is warm but the sand is cold, powdery cream rubbing wrapping itself on my feet like a velvet towel constantly rinsed by the water. Finally, we are all asleep, hanging on to this sunset.

We've had so many of these afternoons. With so much of this shallow happiness, it goes deep.

Three Books & Aflutter

Real World

Natsuo Kirino

PHP 588 Fully Booked

It feels more comfortable to live in a world where we no longer describe Asian Women Writers as “twice marginalized.” There is a comforting pride in saying, instead, Japanese Feminist author. “Real World,” however, is not exactly set out to restore faith in human dignity or describe a bubbly teenage world. This fiction is about hard truths in compelling stories that reveal, in this diagram how much parents understand their children and why they live in their own world.

(1)    How much adults know
(2)    How much teenagers know
(3)    How much adults understand teenagers

I couldn’t always understand myself back then. But I knew I lived in a terrifically amusing world for first times, of survival. Reading this novel now, I understand that my spirit will probably never be as bright as it was then. Adults live as shadows of themselves.

Interpreter of Maladies

Jhumpa Lahiri

PHP 145 BookSale

The literature on the immersion, mixture and eventual diffusion of cultures create a rich, familiar language. Those stories are spoken in a language of adaptation, like songs sung in the same lyrical voice. It is a voice that longs, and then beautifully, fulfills itself.  As if to say, I am writing about this country while I discover my own.

What impressed me was how the writer says determined things softly and tells us that the embracing of different cultures is a happy marriage of contradiction. The stories speak of sadness, infidelity, of love that has been lost, of love that has not been returned or replaced. There’s not a lot of joy. But as you read how the stories are told, there is reassurance, and eventual realization of hope and fulfilment.

The Marriage Plot

Jeffrey Eugenides

PHP315 (paperback) National Bookstore

(Currently reading, 166 pages read)

An uplifting read that makes you aflutter as in the Novels of Jane Austen, Edith Wharton or Thomas Hardy. Love sows its seeds in a Brown University Semiotics class, when it was agitating the landscape of literary theory in the early 1980s, between discussions of how Culler made Derrida’s work digestible.  I succumb to the temptation of telling a dumb joke by saying that I applied specific knowledge from the stuff I picked up in those elective courses I took in College, even if the only application is to enjoy what you’re reading. More importantly, this book is also about the most favoured time of life: College and the Post-College dilemma that follows immediately after. You enjoy, because your memory jogs around your own coming of age.

We are Suffering

The suffering that has been brought upon us, while it does not necessarily redeem, nor is worshipped, becomes an expressed aesthetic. A loquacious, grouchy teenager, and a middle-aged New Yorker who wears his scarf in the most sensible fashion – these are the protagonists, these are the suffering.

Flesh out the suffering in us, dramatize its complex layers so that we do not just watch passively, compel us to actively perceive, and you’ve got a movie that makes a stain in our minds. And it’s a stain we don’t want to wash away.

Shame

My favorite scene from the movie covered in a spot-on review by Anthony Lane of the New Yoker: "Take the wordless subway ride, early in the movie, that finds Brandon, impeccably swathed in coat and scarf, sitting diagonally opposite a young woman. To witness the back-and-forth of their flirtation is like watching Nadal versus Federer on clay. Topspin smiles are dinked across the car, lips are slyly moistened, and McQueen even lobs in a late twist, as the woman proves to be wearing not just a kindly smile but a wedding ring—a combination guaranteed to stir our hero’s loins. The entire sequence is perfect, and PG-rated, and if “Shame” had stopped there it would have been a poem." Read more here.

Margaret

On the final scene, the mother and daughter sit on a performance of Offenbach's Tales of Hoffman in the New York Opera House. In catharsis, they both explode in tears. Thomas Caldwell of Cinema Autopsy described this scene in a most interesting review:  "... a strong case that narrative art – like cinema – still has the power to transcend reality and emotionally connect with people when everything else feels muted by cynicism and resignation." The full review is here.

Perhaps the suffering is conquerable. It might have been a feeling of transcendence from narrative art, or contemplating the poetry in the scenes. I couldn't rationalize my sense of optimism after watching both of these movies, but I am relieved that the optimism isn't feigned.

Little Fish

In the heart of a busy avenue in Quezon City normally clogged by cars and jeeps, a corner leads to an exclusive village of uniformily-built, four-story townhouses. The gates are tightly secured, and despite the pollution, this place had the tall, manicured trees you'd typically find in Tagaytay.

It's a Sunday afternoon, not too blazingly hot, and the clubhouse is where our niece J. is celebrating his 4th. We had home-cooked spaghetti, chicken, along with ice cream and pork barbeque while children frolicked in the pool. It was the stuff of our own childhood dreams, their earth-memories in the making.

The little one loves the water and smiles with pure joy. Mommy, especially in a bathing suit, shows her beautiful flesh in the sun. Today, I'm the Daddy who drives the big van, then sits by the poolside reading a back-issue of the New Yorker.

I amuse myself with how the patrons of farm-to-table resturants in New York wait an hour for a table. When the hour is up, they get a text message. They scramble, as though they're about to miss a flight, as the table is held for five minutes.

I read the feature about a face in the crowd in Occupy Wall Street. Inside my head, my thoughts do their own swimming. Corporate greed has such a powerful feorcity that it diffused and drove out the occupiers in Zuccotti Park and dispersed the movement. A line in the article goes: "You worked all your life and you're a good person and it doesn't matter. You're really prone to getting fucked." Months later, the 99% kept getting fucked while economies endure gut-punching recessions. The corporations are unscathed. Despite my awakening as part of the 99% who kept getting fucked, I am still guiltily thankful for the job I love to hate.

I've always thought about what Fathers think as they watch their kids enjoy in swimming parties. I'm glad it's not all feelings of fluff. It's not a self-congratulatory thought, and it's also note one of desolation and desperation that drives the greedy. It is always of hope that these little ones by the pool will do it right. And so we do.

At Twenty-Seven Months

When we have children, we become (more hopeful) children all over again. As though all this time (until now), we only pretend/ed to be adults. 

I didn't learn to draw well enough, but here's what we drew together. (Mommy does it so much better!) I guess re-learning is a much as a treasure as learning.

While reading the other day, you described the pictures in the books: "monkey eating an apple." "Santa holding a present." From the books, you even recognize personalities: Jesus, Van Gogh, Nietzsche. But mostly, you'd rather see animated characters from cartoons or talking animals. We won't take your childhood away from you by teaching you what is Post-Impressionism or Existentialism. You'll find that out on your own. 

Before you sleep and I take off to work, you say "Good night Daddy . Take care, Daddy. I love you, Daddy." When you get naughty and we respond to your naughtiness, you counter with "Hug Mommy. Kiss Mommy." 

Together, we learn and re-learn. From ABCs to counting, the names of things, grasping language, singing nursery rhymes. Together, we do the silliest things and the sweetest things. 

In the blink of an eye, you'll be a whiny teenager sporting an unruly haircut. Maybe you'lld read Nietzsche and Camus, maybe you won't. You might say things like: the hourglass of existence runs quickly. But these days, we live in a realm of discovery and fascination that's inherent to a child. Magical is an honest emotion to describe what we are going through. So we insist to be always with you. In the theory of eternal recurrence, all this magic is happening always.

And all over again. As you sieze the day, you'll understand you don't only live once.