Well Then, Once More

I ran the half-marathon course of the Run United Philippine Marathon last October 5th. I knew I wasn't going to hit a sub-2, but I felt stronger compared to my last 21k race. This time, my training was more robust and I finished at 2:12. Not my best and could be better, yeah. But what was truly rewarding was the steam I had left towards the end, like I wasn't all used up or exhausted. The feeling at the finish line was to want to go through the race again. Beaded beautifully in sweat, that medal dangling on my chest, I asked myself, "When's the next one?" The endorphins kicked in my head, I looked at the open sky, and smelled the 6am air rising from the grass of the race village. I'm walking slowly, stretching, but I'm high, as though earth is moving on my favor.

 

Here's to the fate that we love, and everything we do again and again. We squander this love, and do not surrender to just a single piece of joy. We say, “Was that life? Well then, once more.”

 

A few days ago, D. and I received an answer to the question I asked myself after the race. The bun in her oven is six weeks and baking, coming this July 2015.

I remember our reactions when we first saw the results on the pregnancy test kit, or when we went to the doctor to confirm. We didn't jump for joy. I didn't announce it to the neighbors nor did we post it on social media. We had a more sober reaction. It called for a drink. I opened the chilled bottle of Stolichnaya in the ref, and made a vodka seven. It was calm, quiet, celebratory toast. Our reaction did not at all mean that we weren't excited. Our excitement remains unwavering as our happiness has just multiplied. This time we're just more complacent. The first experience of having a child will not diminish that of our second. We're stronger now, as some of the fears that we've known before will be assuaged by experience.

 

And we are so happy for Kuya I. We will be able to grant both of them the opportunity, the powerful bond with a sibling. "I hope it's a boy!" He says. He wants to call the baby Human Torch, and we all could be the fantastic four. Hearing him say that, we light up.

 

We know that the seemingly irreversible dysfunctions of this country, the declining state of the environment, the mere difficulty of living, of having another mouth to feed, makes one rethink the prospect of bringing another child into the world. We knew though, in our hearts, that having a child, and this time a second child, is a repeated expression of our profoundest affirmation of hope. We know for a fact that with our first one, we were not hardened by the daily grind, nor were we disheartened by the chores, errands, exhaustion, the changing of diapers, or miscellaneous surprises that caught us blindsided before. We loved it, we loved being parents, and being at our best at raising children who will be wiser and respectful towards life and the lives of others.

 

We look forward to more of the reading, of watching how a child’s innocence form itself into consciousness, a butterfly coming out of a cocoon. We look forward to the smell of baby cologne wafting through the air, crisp linen scent, the subtle sweetness it leaves in the air. Because in our minds, our souls were stirring, singing in a chorus, and we started seeing ourselves in a circle of four.

 

Yes, we are ready. We are ready to love and give everything, all over again.

Funny Love Stories Versus Capitalism

Oh, dear diary. My youth has passed, but the wisdom of age hardly beckons. Why is it so hard to be a grown-up man in this world?

I read Gary Shtyengart's Super Sad Love Story around the time Israel was bombing Gaza with weapons that are probably financed and politically backed by powerful Jews in America. My FB profile bore the flag of Palestine, formed in a ribbon, standing with them.

Shortly after, the umbrella revolution of Hong Kong begins. China, drunk with its self-discovery as global superpower, quells it, apparently by having the triad’s thugs beat up peaceful protesters.

And while people continue to try to occupy, the world is still owned by the 1%

In the meantime, we are now on iphone 6 and IOS 8.2 while Samsung is beating up Apple in sales.

The book is a preview of the bleak future. The cards we have right now, what's happening around us now, is a tell that Styengart delivers elegantly and effectively in a self-deprecating romantic comedy. Simultaneously, it is a satirical culmination of capitalism, a critique on the culture of consumerism. While the US markets collapse, corporate greed (merged or acquired by the Chinese) has taken itself to the point of exploring physical immortality!

China is the world leader and superpower. The dollar is “yuan-pegged” and American is deep in debt, crushed in a financial crisis. People are judged and constantly monitored by literal credit poles and are described as HNWI (High Net Worth Individuals) or LWNI (Low Net Worth Individuals). We go around with “fuckability” ratings. The new fashion is "onion skin" jeans and "total surrenders"or underwear that comes off with a press of a button.

Shtyengart infuses the book with a new language and a culture. This language and culture is a monster, and our generation, already lost to our electronic lives is its baby stage. The iPhone grows up to the “apparat” and we dive deeper into that digital limbo. “Images” is an actual university major and “assertiveness” is a minor. Acronyms has bastardized language and “streaming” and “scanning” as opposed to reading, tarnishing all wisdom.

I read this book in its electronic version, and it’s seemingly intentional how the people of the future despise the smell  of books. The protagonist goes,

“You’re my sacred ones.” I told the books. “No one but me still cares about you. But I’m going to keep you with me forever. And one day I’ll make you important again.” I thought about that terrible calumny of the new generation: that books smell.

Like many books about the future, this one has a glamorized nostalgia glorifies the present time. New YorkCity is given an eloquent tribute.

Noah told me that there’s a day during the summer when the sun hits the broad avenues at such an angle that you experience the sensation of the whole city being flooded by a melancholy twentieth-century light, even the most prosaic, unloved buildings appearing bright and nuclear the edge of your vision that when this happens you want to both cry for something lost and run out there and welcome the decline of the day.

The trees held fast, but the cityscape was in constant flux. The skyscrapers framing the lower half of the park looked tired of their history, stripped of commerce, the executive upper floors staring down into empty lobbies and concrete plazas where lamb kebabs and hummus spreads once fueled the world’s most storied white-collar workforce. Soon they will be replaced with curt, smart residential units with Arab, Asian and Norse designations.

New York, as it is now, is a melting of cultures. It celebrates and hinges upon this blending, as it attacks American Xenophobia. And this is supposed to be a funny story, and I laugh at the racial stereotypes that were presented precisely. The Korean mom goes:

How do you think you have Mommy for? Anyway, you have trouble write to me not only when you need money. When you work lawyer Mommy proud of you and you do not ask her for money. You will be proud because you help Mommy and family. Family is most important, otherwise, why GOD put us on earth? …Revernd Cho say all young people have special path? Please tell me if you know, other wise we look together. And keep Jesu in your heart, it is important! Also there are Korean boys everywhere. Go to Korean church and you will find date.

Perhaps it isn't so precise, or I haven't looked hard enough. I've been trying too look up a reference of this supposed Korean Proverb, to no avail: 

Beyond the mountains, according to the old Korean proverb Grace had once told me, were more mountains. We’d only just begun.

Gary Shteyngart, with girlfriend Mabel Hwang;
photo by Melissa Hom; from New York Magazine

The Ghost's Perspective

The wholesome-is-awesome pace of my family-centered life settles in a consistent trend. Work is stressful, the travelling makes me lose my bearings even more quickly but I've more or less adapted in settling with it in my own amicable way. 

The truth is I spend the largest slice of my time with family. I have consciously chosen to enjoy conversations with I. and D. At age 4, he sings Yellow Submarine and Strawberry Fields Forever, and duets with D. on songs from Disney. Spending time with them is something like being introverts, altogether. Nonetheless, I allocated alone time and ran 71.5km last August including an organized half-marathon. 

I've made the most progress in reading this year, thanks to the ebook reader. When Haruki Murakami's new novel came out in bookstore shelves, I rewarded myself with the First American Edition and smelled all the creaminess out of the paper. I finished it in a week. Reading it and holding it was like making a sugary, intangible feeling - tangible. And I know I will find the time to write about that separately. And with everything that occupies our time - we had renovations going on at home.  

I do not find a sense of fulfillment in work. I will not glamorize the lifestyle it has enabled, nor romanticize how the industry I belong to has supported the economy and generated 1 million jobs. But I do find fulfillment in what I do outside work. If I lose my job, I know I have found how to sustain what truly fills me with joy and continue striving to shape life with some meaning.  

For all that I've received, I am thankful. I step away from myself now and become a ghost that looks at the spot where I am. It's not so bad. I go back and tell myself never to take this fleeting thing for granted. 

As a family, we have lunches and dinners out every so often. A Sunday or two ago we were at a Korean restaurant. The sun had just set. We start with romaine lettuce, kimchi, drink barley tea. We order a platter of meat. A waitress grilled the meat at our table: thin short ribs, beef top blade, beef chuck roll. The smoke rises in my face. 

There goes the ghost. I hear it beneath the fizz, humming a quiet Sunday piano piece. It's familiar. Joe Hisaishi's playing the theme from Spirited Away.

 

Drafting Dreams

How does one endeavor to build someone's happiness and draft the blueprint of an early history of someone's dreams? We are never really too conscious of this question as we fulfill our day-to-day obligations as parents - feeding, clothing, reading, introducing the world and being at best efforts to hand off values and a sense of responsibility. We were never the type of parents who think that they will be grooming a genius who will end the evils of greed and capitalism, but we try in our own humble, neutral way, to show him how we went about this fascinating and often perplexing planet that somehow afforded us some joys. 

Our answer to the question is to reciprocate the happiness that has been passed on to us, then let him learn to build it on his own and make it real by sharing it with others and spreading kindness. Now, that's not bad coming from a rather preachy, slightly eccentric father who makes an effort to keep his own table and eat alone during lunch at the office. 

Our answer to the question is to make you thirst for knowing, and discovering joy as you immerse into the process of knowing through books, through your interactions with people, through travelling, through the internet (your favorite). And while you are only four, we also respected your interests and inclinations - which is probably shaped from our own. One of the few things your father believed in Plato was that Intelligence results to Goodness. I simplify it, or maybe made it less generalized, in saying that wisdom persuades us to be kind. 

So to celebrate your fourth 360-degree spin around the earth, we didn't take you to Greece to learn about the ancients, or to Sudan to experience hunger first-hand, nor did we buy you a new Mac, or a new book. Heavily weighing upon your own interests as a four year old, and our middle-class inclinations, we took you to Hong Kong Disneyland. 

So it was now all part of the building of your happiness, drafted upon the blueprint of the early history of your dreams. This is the beginning of your learning about the fascination and consternation that you will gather in life as your travel. You sat on my shoulders while we watched the fireworks blasting in tune with themes from Disney movies. We saw your favorite Philharmagic twice, our perceptions of reality made positively phantasmal by 3D, by evocative scents, by water squirted to us while in the theater. You were wearing your Woody costume in the flights of fancy parade, and Woody stopped by to hug you. We had breakfast with Chef Mickey. 

It was all as if the draft of your dreams was a fulfillment of one of our own. 

Chumu-Chunking Express

It's past midnight. We just finished an obligatory trek up to Victoria Peak via the tram, the ding-ding tram, and a bus on the way down. We went along with our friend B. and her two kids after Xiao Long Baos at the Din Tai Fung. Up at the peak, We congratulated ourselves for the toursity effort with a 22oz Stella Artois each and spent an hour drinking with a panoramic view of the city by the window. I. sleeps on my shoulder.

As soon as we were back in our Causeway Bay hotel at Pennington St., I go down again to get more booze. I'm on the lookout for cheaper beer, as the prices at Victoria Peak and Disneyland had been criminal. During this trip, we've dined at two Michelin star restaurants. In this midnight walk, I spot a hole in the wall and point a picture of a dimsum. The old man, alone at the counter, didn't speak any english but gestured there's no more but gave me a plate of something anyway. I hold my money in my open palm and he takes how much its worth.

I found a supposedly-famous Danish Bakery and it was closed. I peek through the window and in the dark - a baker wearing a sando is mixing the dough as early as 1am.

I remember Chunking Express.  It "depcited a paradox... even though the characters live in densely packed Hong Kong, they are mostly lonely and live in their own inner worlds." I keep walking.

The 7-11's still busy at this time of day, and I get 500ml cans of Stella Artois at about HK$16. A relief after paying almost HK$99 for 22oz earlier at the peak. I try some of the local chips. Back at the hotel, the pleasant staff greet me good night. Chillout music pipes in at the elevator, giving the hotel an urban, contemporary feel. There is an aromatic scent of wood, halogen lights glowing against the black walls and mirrors.  I have my beer and chips by the bed, world cup on the TV along with watching my wife and son sleep in a part of the city that always sells and never seems to get tired. It's like slipping back in this cozy space inside me, lodged in some inner world, in some other country. Only this time, I'm certainly not lonely. 

The Reveling in Between

D. has a way of conjuring an element of spontaneity in her planning. An itinerary she's designed will have several options, room for surprises, room for being lost and amazed. Her intent and thought-process is around being sunk into the fun and learned experience of travel as opposed to a mechanical following of instructions, guides or maps.

We traverse life this way, not going from point A to point B, but reveling in between.

Our four-day trip to Hong Kong revolved around a two-day pass to Disneyland in celebration of our boy's Fourth. In my mind, that was our sole agenda, almost as if I had a mercantile approach to planning a trip alongside achieving an objective. I had to be reminded, or perhaps enlightened, with the fact that we needed to delve and enjoy the most minute of details as opposed to seeing a trip as a purchased experience. That was the look on the little one's face when he saw his own Mickey Mouse hotel slippers, of Mickey Mouse speaking in the elevator, or Mickey Mouse as the chef in the restaurant.

Though I didn't even count on being able to run because we had a full agenda, she did ask me to pack my running shoes. I might find Victoria Park or the well-equipped hotel gym's treadmill inviting. When I looked down from the window of the tasteful hotel she picked for us in Lantau Island, the view unfolded like a well thought-out running path. My feet tickled. From nine floors up, I looked down and said, I'm running there.

As I may have only run this path once, I dropped the idea of keeping a decent pace or even covering a set distance. Beaded in sweat, I ran this path with the purest of reasons: seeing the breathtaking views, inhaling the mountain air, immersing in another country's everyday life and finding myself, in yet another unfamiliar path - where I ran for the first time.