Category: Stuff and Things

In the venerable spirit of using this blog as my notepad, I thought I should follow up my introspective, beret-wearing New Year’s post with a bloodlessly practical list of resolutions. Or if not practical, then at least bloodless!

This year, I half-heartedly resolve to:

Learn Mandarin: Mandarin is the language of the future, or so they say. I’ve never been one to focus too much on the “usefulness” of languages, having already poured significant energy into study such burgeoning international languages as Tagalog, Vietnamese, and Bahasa Indonesia. (The fact that they were pretty useful when I was living in their respective countries only slightly mitigates my sarcasm.) That said, falling in love with Taipei last year provided a powerful inspiration, and I’m excited to escape the tyranny of phonetic writing and delve into a whole other approach to the representation of verbal ideas. The whole language-of-the-future thing might be more compelling if I wasn’t planning to confuse the bejeesus out of myself by taking mainland-oriented online courses that use simplified characters before spending a month in traditional character-using Taiwan. If all else fails, at least I’ll get to eat a lot of stinky tofu.

Prognosis: Proper Chinese writing technique is out of the question when I can bypass all the niceties of stroke order using the massive cheat of Pinyin keyboarding software – What a time to be alive! I doubt I’ll learn to read too many characters, either, beyond the ones that regularly appear on restaurant menus. That said, I think I’ll at least be able to speak coherently enough for the locals to reply with suitable condescension. (Just kidding – Taiwanese people are lovely!)

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Back in my rebellious teenage days, a rotund, sweat pants-wearing Bloggerbels spent the vast expanses of free time afforded by his status as a social pariah on pondering the deepest questions of human existence. Taking Homer Simpson’s classic utterance of “Everyone is stupid except for me” as my non-ironic life’s motto, I furiously scribbled my undercooked “insights” into beaten-up notebooks, presumably so that posterity would not be robbed of my precious gift.

One of the many imagined “epiphanies” that sprung from just below my mussed brown hair was related to the connection between consciousness and the afterlife. How, I asked myself, could I simply cease to exist at death, given that I was quite obviously conscious and aware at that precise moment? If there was clearly some conscious agent present to pose the question, how could that same asker simply seem to exist? How could this seemingly unbroken stream of consciousness simply stop? It would feel like a negation of every undeniably real moment of consciousness that had become before.

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For someone who talks about travel a lot, I sure hate talking about travel. I suppose it’s inevitable that the topic should come up – when I’m traveling for half a year at a stretch, as I am now, the subject tends to dominate my life. It’s a good topic for breaking the ice with locals and fellow travelers, and epic tales of my seat-of-the-pants backpacking adventures can certainly impress timid two-week package tourists.

And yet, I can’t escape the dirty feeling that comes with talking about travel. (And yep – I’m feeling it right now!) Why is that, though?

First of all, I feel like I’m just not as excited about it as I’m supposed to be. I’ve lived the past decade of my life overseas, and have spent a significant chunk of that time traveling. At this point, I can muster about the same amount of enthusiasm for a trip to a new country as I would for a really good cup of coffee – it’s not nothing, because I do love a good cup of coffee, but there’s still something perfunctory about constantly feeding one’s addictions, whether they be to caffeine or to travel.

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I write this on a train from Bucharest to Transylvania, on an evening which also happens to be the morning of the 2016 US presidential election. I want to write about the United States, but my topic is not political – although, depending on the outcome of the election, my opinion of America may have shifted significantly by the Transylvanian morning.

I’ve been thinking differently about America since two years ago – which, in spite of all of my traveling, happened to be my first actual visit to the United States. One reason I delayed visiting for so long was because we Canadians – and yes, I now admit to the secret shame of being a Canadian – have been inundated with absurdly negative ideas about our neighbours to the south. “Oh, those Americans are so dumb,” a Canadian might say inbetween slapshots or hacks at the base of an uncommonly thick pine tree. “They’re all religious nutjobs who run around shooting at each other! Not like us – we’re so polite and peaceful, and we have universal health care!”

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At the time of writing (April 24, 2016), I am coming off a three month blogging drought. To get back into the groove, I thought I should post a rough list of possible future posts. If I end up going a few months without posting anything again, you are encouraged to angrily demand that I get back to work and write whichever of these posts sounds most interesting to you. You’ll be doing me a great service!

So here’s the list, which I will continue to update occasionally:

Metro Manila has a reputation, not entirely unwarranted, for being a rather chaotic, messy place – the Tagalog word for this, magulo, is much more mellifluous than any English equivalent, and I’m not sure that any one English word can really capture its spirit. And while it’s true that Manila can get pretty nuts compared to what most westerners are accustomed to, the fact is that people’s experiences of the place vary greatly. The spoiled expat (of which I am not one!) and the humble sidewalk cigarette vendor selling his wares on a polluted highway obviously have very different experiences of the place. But nonetheless, it is possible to lead a comfortable existence here.

When I say “comfortable”, I do not mean comfort in the preferred local sense of entirely avoiding ever doing any of the things that 75% of Filipinos have to do, like riding public transit, washing their own dishes, or going to places that they don’t especially like. For me, doing things comfortably involves a reasonable balance of efficiency, relaxation, and relative freedom from crime, pollution, traffic, extreme heat, and the various other pitfalls of urban living. But by my definition, comfort doesn’t have to mean living one’s entire life inside a hermetically sealed, air-conditioned bubble, free from any awareness that the Philippines is, in fact, a subtropical country, or carefully avoiding the slightest unwanted intrusion from poor people in non-servile roles. A full, varied adult life has at least a bit of room for discomfort, confrontation, frustration and stress, as long as we ultimately have enough moments of serenity and joy to balance them out. I consider myself comfortable because my life is, by and large, ridiculously easy and low-stress; but I am not unfamiliar with the smell of diesel, the rivers of sweat that pour down my forehead on a hot summer’s day when my jeepney is stuck in traffic, or having a stranger’s nose in my armpit on the MRT (better them than me, at least!).

For most people in Manila – certainly office workers in cozy air-conditioned buildings – the main discomfort of their day occurs while in transit through Manila’s mind-boggling traffic jams and its byzantine public transit system. And for that reason, one of the biggest parts of a comfortable life in Manila is traveling comfortably. A comfortable life may not be one where we spend hours of each day stuck in traffic, squeezed up against strangers on the bus or choking on pollution, but a comfortable life can include all of those things, as well – in moderation.

So here, now, are some ways to travel comfortably in Manila:

1. Have A Lot of Money

This is, by far, the easiest way to live and travel comfortably in Manila – assuming, of course, that you actually do have a lot of money. By Manila standards I am not exactly rich, and I live like someone who earns even less – living below my means, so to speak. I prefer to live a simple life, and having a lot of money isn’t a requirement for my version of comfort. But, all other things being equal, it sure doesn’t hurt to be rich out here! In a place where Cash Rules Everything Around You (C.R.E.A.Y.), having buckets of money will let you take constant shortcuts in life while never leaving the lap of luxury. Got an overflowing basket of dirty laundry? Pay somebody to wash it! Want to get to work comfortably? Buy a car and pay somebody to drive you! Want to get to work even faster? Buy a condo next to your office! Need somebody killed? Well, you really shouldn’t, but that can be arranged for a price, as well. Read More

(Note: If you really just want to know how to make yogurt, skip the seemingly obligatory preamble and go straight to the section marked “How to Make Yogurt in a Subtropical Climate When You’re Really Cheap”.)

In the Philippines, as in many parts of Asia, natural dairy products are not really part of the local culture. “Milk” usually means infant formula with added palm and coconut oil. “Cheese” is… well, I don’t know what it is, exactly – check the ingredients, of which there are many. Filipinos do produce a fairly delicious natural cottage cheese called kesong puti, but it is seldom consumed in reality, and is more something that people wistfully imagine being consumed in a romanticized version of the Philippines of yore – those quaint olden times when food was not carcinogenic and locals would put on their frilliest dresses and freshly-pressed barong and ride a kalesa to visit Calle Escolta and drink tsokolate made from fresh tableya. Those were the days, yes, but progress marches on, and we have since moved on to the wonderful, gleaming modernity of SM Megamall, Swiss Miss and Quickmelt.

This isn’t as bad as it sounds, though. I’ve long since learned to adapt, and enjoy all of the wonderful foods that are part of the local culture, like fresh tropical fruits and delicious seafood. So when I’m craving a rich, creamy taste that isn’t made with Indonesian palm oil haunted by the ghosts of dead orangutans, I can go to the market and order a bag of freshly-preshed coconut milk. Even better than the actual taste might be the experience of watching it get squeezed out in front of me by an impressively shirtless man with a hydraulic press. It’s delicious, and food doesn’t get any more natural. And oh, those abs! Read More

Oh, hello! How are you? It is good to meet you. My name is An Asshole.

Since we have just met, I would like you to play a game with me. It is a guessing game. I always invite those who I have just met to play this game, because it is a game that I enjoy very much.

The game works this way: Based on my appearance, can you guess my age? Please guess my age. Thank you for guessing my age.

Ha! Ha! Ha! You have guessed an age that is much lower than my actual age. You see, I look much younger than most people who have the same age as me. This is because most people with this age look older than I do. Ha! Ha! Ha!

Thank you for playing this game with me. By guessing incorrectly, you have improved my self-esteem. You have reaffirmed my belief that I have aged more gracefully than the average individual born in the year in which I was born. I look forward to playing this game with the next person I meet, as well.

I am An Asshole, and I am an asshole.

After months of being nigh-unreadable on mobile devices, Bloggerbels has finally entered the 21st century (or at least the first decade of it) with the installation of a new WordPress theme. Apologies to everyone who had to slog through the earlier iteration of the site on their smart phones – The original theme I installed claimed to be mobile-friendly, but wasn’t, and it took a while for me to get over the sting of this deception and find one that actually was optimized for smartphones. Enjoy a horizontal scrolling-free 2016, friends!

P.S. While narcissistically Googling my own blog, I was very amused to see that someone had bothered to lift (with citation) my horribly backlit, hurriedly snapped photo of a not-especially-nice part of Alabang. I guess I’m… flattered?