Soul Highway

What I'm craving for today

Question: Can you make a calamansi plant grow in a pot and make it live through far from tropical weather?
Question: Can you take calamansi seeds to the US?
If the answer to both questions is yes, I'm taking some seeds with me on a return trip from the Philippines.

You can take the Pinay out of Pinas, but...

she will still go looking for Cebo (Sebo?) de Macho in the land of skin rejuvenating lotions and age-defying creams. When I left the Philippines over a year ago I should have thrown in at least a hundred pieces of this cheap emollient in my luggage, along with Omega Painkiller and Efficascent Oil.

I have tried quite a few "American-brand" skin therapy products like Mederma (which made me itch like crazy) and Gold Bond but I'm not satisfied with the results. The problem I'm trying to address are my battlescars in the kitchen in my attempts to conquer the oven, the stovetop and the iron. (I know that is an indictment of how much a homebody I was prior to getting married.) To my credit, I have not burned myself in the last six months. Does that mean I'm making progress?

Determined to erase evidence of my culinary mishaps, I went to this Filipino store two blocks from the apartment only to be told that they've ran out of stock. "Marami yatang nagka-peklat ngayon," the storeowner said. (Seems like a lot of people have had scars lately.) Seems like Filipinos in the area are defaulting to the trusty and inexpensive Cebo de Macho, if you ask me.

So now I have to wait till December for new stocks to arrive. This is like waiting for the most high-tech phone to go on the market. Now that I know Cebo de Macho are selling like hotcakes over here, I am prepared to outmaneuver my competitors. As in, I am prepared to resort to hoarding.

By the way, I have fallen in love with smooth top cooking ranges! Each time the husband and I would go into an appliance store, I am tempted to run my hand over the flat surface. I am lusting for it when I'm trying to put together my dream kitchen in my mind. Can you imagine how convenient it is for neat freaks like me? Spills gone in seconds! The husband, on the other hand, is reluctant. "Sweetie, you even burn yourself when you're looking right at the red hot coils!" He has a point there.

Bomb rips through Philippine Congress

More news of instability from home. Destabilizers, it would seem, are becoming more and more brazen with each attempt. However, comments from Youtube viewers on why the supposed "terrorists/anarchists" did not make the bomb explode DURING the session do say a lot about the amount of public sympathy our politicians are getting. Details of the story can be found here.

From Bayawan to Amerika

Life is amazing. In my last post, I mentioned a dear friend who I've started to reconnect with after more than 10 years that left our friendship dormant. We went to the same university together but since we were pursuing different degrees, we slowly drifted apart and lost contact. I don’t think we even got the chance to congratulate each other on graduation day. Every now and then I’d get snippets of information from former high school classmates I happened to bump into on very rare occasions, or courtesy of my brother who traveled to our hometown more often. I learned that she married a classmate from high school (isn’t that cute?), moved to Manila and that she is now a proud mom.

When I stumbled on her sister’s Friendster profile early this year I didn’t think that would subsequently re-open our communication channels. As fate would have it, she is now in the US as well working as a teacher. After exchanging a few emails, we finally got on the phone and made up for lost time by engaging in marathon gossip (who married who, who got dumped, who left town, who got fat) and flashback storytelling on our zero-expense adventures in a sleepy, seaside town where the biggest happenings were the fiesta, beauty pageants, singing competitions and typhoons.

Our idea of fun back then was going to the beach during low tide to gather mussels and seaweed (that’s free dinner, for you) and trek across sugarcane plantations at high noon simply because we liked walking – and we didn’t have any money. We were weird in a way that we once wore almost matching jumpers during one of our escapades and lathered our legs with cooking oil when we ran out of lotion. Our restless feet brought us from one end of the town to the other visiting classmates, attending parties, watching basketball competitions and, in a way, stalking our crushes. In short, we got our money’s worth for our sturdy “tsinelas.” We would help finish each other’s household chores so we could escape to wherever we were planning to go. We were at each other’s houses so often that our parents had no choice but to tolerate our presence and wacky ways.

She still calls me “Carmelites,” like most of my high school buddies. In the Philippines, your name will artistically evolve as you go through different phases in life and mostly without your consent. I went from Carmelee in elementary to Carmelites in high school, to Fleur (and its variations) in college, to Luntz, Luntao and Tao when I started working in the media. I am either Lee, Inday or Ulay (owing to my having married “late”, by Philippine standards) in my family. The husband is one of the very few people who can pronounce my name right but even he has made certain modifications – from the exaggerrated Fleerrr, to Fleurness to the extended “my Filipina wife.” My friend, Amelyn, is lucky enough to only have one first name and so it was either that or Ling-ling among friends. When she started calling me by my nickname over the phone, it was like high school all over again – without the zits and silliness.

Ten years later and here we are on breakneck conversations. At one point she said I am really her bestfriend for how else should one explain this rather interesting twist of fate? I myself did not expect for us to revive our friendship in, of all places, the US. I feel I am blessed though. Not all people are given the chance to reconnect with long-lost friends and pick up from where they left off. Good friends are hard to find and friends who know you through and through are the rarest of them all.

Another sad end to a dream

I received a call yesterday morning from my bestfriend from high school who now teaches in New York. A Filipina teacher from the Maryland area had committed suicide last week by hanging herself using a computer cable in her room. She was originally from Cebu. Only last May, another teacher also chose to end her life.

Thousands of Filipino teachers come to the US every year, lured by a much higher pay and immigration opportunities for their families. Behind this seemingly exciting journey, however, are solitary struggles with depression and difficulties adjusting to their workplace and new environment. Filipinos are naturally sociable people who often draw their strength from their solid network friends and families. Removed from all of that, loneliness can be lethal.

I hope that families of immigrant Filipinos realize the kind of sacrifice it takes to lose that sense of familiarity around you. I hope they realize that each balikbayan box or money order they receive carries the tears, sweat and dreams of those who have traveled 10,000 miles away from home.

Literary lion Norman Mailer dies

If you're not familiar with Norman Mailer, go ahead and dig up "The Executioner's Song." Mailer is, without question, a superb and original storyteller - and always had a mouthful to say about anything and everything. I have a lot of respect for this writer, although he left me rather perplexed with his 1983 novel "Ancient Evenings." While he was always in pursuit for that "great American novel" all his life, the title "literary giant" is befitting.

A journalist, but not quite fond of journalism, he once said:
"...generally speaking journalism is sloppy writing, and unless you have a real talent, it can injure you to write too quickly, come to too many conclusions. It’s frantic and hysterical.

"Lots of journalism writing is bad because the pressure of being a good writer is not the first talent you need to be a good journalist. The first talent you need is the emotional readiness to introduce yourself to strangers and pick their brains."

And a quote the husband will surely agree about journalism:
"You can't be too certain about what happened."