Sunday, May 10, 2026
9:00 AM |
Celebrations and Commiserations
April was one big beautiful madness for me. Right from its very start that month, I was in Iloilo City [for the first time ever] to take part of that UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy’s celebration of National Food Month—a few days of magnificent feasting which more than proved Iloilo City’s point over why it was thus designated as a culinary capital for the country. A week later, I was off doing the 3rd Dumaguete Literary Festival, where I also launched my latest fiction collection, and also got to witness Dumaguete being officially designated as UNESCO Creative City of Literature. On the day the festival ended, I was also part of the UNESCO National Commission of the Philippines [UNACOM]’s writeshop, which gathered together cultural advocates from around the country in a project to foster a book detailing the richness of UNESCO-designated places in the Philippines. And then a week later, after settling down for a few days to start summer school, I was doing a week-long book tour in Manila, from making my debut at Dia del Libro to doing a book talk at UP Likhaan at the University of the Philippines in Diliman. Sometimes I wondered where I was channeling my energy. I am fifty years old, not exactly a spring chicken anymore.
I realized even then that I was very privileged to have been given the chances to do all of these things. But now, on the tenth day of May, I have finally rested enough to do a bit of introspection. It’s a bit jarring, truth to tell, to find myself beholding slower days these days, but thank God for that. Rest is essential.
Last Friday, just for the sake of being around friends in a more social context [besides doing events together], we went for a dinner, a very lovely one, at Mohammad Malik’s farm in Palinpinon, Valencia with Pinspired’s Evgeniya Spiridonova and Max Vasiliev as our guests of honor. This was ostensibly to celebrate their new baby, and so we informally called the gathering “Jane’s Russian Dinner”—simply for the fact that this dinner was supposed to have happened last December, where she promised to prepare a Russian dish called “shuba,” on the very night she unexpectedly gave birth to her second child, which caused its deferment.
The fulfillment of that canceled dinner came five months later, because there was much to celebrate. There was news of new pregnancies, of impending weddings, of new scholarships abroad, and of recent events coming to successful fulfillments—and so we gathered. Aside from Jane and Max, there was Mohammed Malik and Finola Uy, our hosts. And Libraria’s Ernest and Gayle Acar. And the artists Hersley-Ven Casero and Toulla Mavromati-Casero. And Renz Torres and me—really the gay representation of the lot. [Unfortunately, another couple, the writer Hannah Portugal-Magno and her medical doctor husband Pito Magno, had to beg off at the last minute, because of an emergency.] So we celebrated all these over Renz’s grilled bangus and ampalaya salad, and Gayle’s lemon orzo with feta and alugbati, and Toulla’s peanut noodles and Greek stir-fry, Ella’s coffee bake and fresh fruits, Mo’s biko, Hersley’s baye-baye from Baywan, and Jane’s beef stroganoff and the pièce de résistance, her shuba [or “herring under a fur coat”].
The talk over the delicious, very international, meal was celebratory, but we also came to realize that despite all the good news, we were also commiserating over sudden deaths and accidents that pushed us to the edge. One of us on that table actually revealed he almost had a heart attack last month—probably from stress and from the unbearable heat that is now defining the current summer in Dumaguete. This was shocking. (Because what do you mean we almost lost you, and we didn’t even know?)
Then we made a brief recounting of unfortunate things of recent days.
How Onna Rhea Quizo’s father died a few days before the start of the Duma LitFest, but that she still chose to perform in the short play Sisa: Panaghoy ng Pinakamiserableng Babaeng Katha ni Rizal, which we moved from the first day of the festival to the last upon Onna’s request, with the play becoming a good rejoinder to Atom Araullo’s talk regarding writing in dangerous times. [Onna memorized the last page of the play on the day she buried her father!]
How the essayist Rica Bolipata-Santos had to fly home to Manila early in the festival, because her brother, the renowned cellist Chino Bolipata, suddenly died. And then this revealed a strange pattern with her Dumaguete visits over the years: when she was a fellow at the Silliman Writers Workshop in 2010, her father died. When she became a panelist in 2019, someone in her family also died, but she chose to stay for the rest of her week in Dumaguete and kept the news of that death to herself. And now, as a panelist for the literary festival, this recent death of a brother. “Dumaguete does not love me, Ian,” she messaged me after we arranged for her emergency flight back home to Manila. I responded, feebly: “But we do.” How do you respond to this strange happenstance?
Then there was how theatre artist and YATTA stalwart Nikki Cimafranca met a serious motor accident the same week we opened the LitFest—and was in the ICU for days on end, unconscious, with a clot in his brain. [Thank God he has since woken up and is feeling much better.]
Then there was how a few of our LitFest guests, flying home to Manila on the last day of the festival via a certain airline, found themselves in an emergency that necessitated a detour to Iloilo City. One guest in that flight messaged me about how the cabin was a furnace and how everyone was struggling to breath [a baby turned blue!], how the emergency masks dropped from the ceiling in a scene that could only be recalled in movies about plane crashes, and how everyone in the flight were suddenly prayerful and muttering “I love you’s” to each other, getting ready for whatever end might come. Upon landing in Iloilo, my friend chose to fly home in a separate airline from her husband, “just in case.” [Another friend chose to stay in Iloilo City for a few days, in an unplanned vacation.]
It‘s so easy to reduce all these to the simplest catch-all: life is short. But frankly I don’t know what to glean from all these except that in the end, while we deeply mourn the loss of our friends and loved ones, and while we deeply empathize with strange emergencies, ultimately the best of our nature wants us to celebrate our humanity and our art. Like what Onna did. [Which I love her for.]
And sometimes a small dinner with friends, on a relaxed night in a farm, gathered together without any agenda except to foster friendship and camaraderie, can define that celebration.
Labels: death, dinners, dumaguete, friends, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Saturday, November 08, 2025
I just went on an unfriending spree, because Facebook was telling me I had reached my maximum, and because my friends' list really needed culling. Because why am I friends with restaurants and hotels and organizations [some of which are gone, and should really just use Pages], and buildings, and ... pets? Also unfriended dead friends, which was particularly sad.Labels: facebook, friends, life, social media
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Thursday, October 02, 2025
9:00 AM |
Tropical Comforts and Watercolor Serenity
I did not get to see Gretchen Villanueva-Heras’ new solo exhibition, Tropical State of Mind, when it opened at The Gallery by Pinspired at The Henry Resort last August 23—which feels like forever. The show has since been extended to October 14, which speaks volumes about its popularity. Indeed, when I finally made time to see the exhibition for myself, most of the works have been marked “reserved”—the good news of buyers waiting in the wings.
I liked it. I think the show showcases Gretchen’s delicate watercolor works with the unmistakable intimacy of someone who paints not to impress but to remember. [Point of disclosure: Gretchen is a former student.] Also known by her moniker “GretchensWater,” I know her to be a self-taught artist from Bais City whose previous works have seemed to me to be shaped by memory, place, and personal history. In this new collection, she definitely draws inspiration from her coastal hometown and the tropics that surround her. I like, above all their clarity, and simplicity: there is no grandstanding in this show, no forced irony, no attempts at avant-garde shock. Instead, what we have is a clearness of vision steeped in the ordinary, but translated into light, into color, and into tenderness.
In this sense, Gretchen’s work has to be read as something deeply personal. You can also sense in her brushstrokes the shadow of her artist father’s craftsmanship. You can also sense her nostalgia of growing up in a house where hands built things meant to last. You can sense that there is a deep affection for heritage and family woven into her compositions, which is why each painting feels like a page from a watercolor diary. Clearly influenced by her own fascination with the past, Gretchen’s works are not just depictions of flora and provincial landscapes but fragments of storytelling—they are memories folded into botanical patterns and sunlit textures.
There is a quiet lushness in these watercolors, a sense of calm that feels almost radical in an age addicted to speed and spectacle. The series—botanical vignettes, glimpses of familiar roads, curated moments of tropical life—wears its heart on its sleeve. They do not shout. They do not demand. They invite. And in that invitation, they allow us to remember what it means to breathe.
What strikes me first is the brushwork. Watercolor is a famously unforgiving medium; one careless stroke and the whole composition buckles into mud. Yet here we see restraint: the veins of banana leaves rendered with precision, the glisten of palm fronds caught mid-sway, the woven fibers of a solihiya chair articulated with tenderness. The artist gives us details that never overwhelm but always anchor, as if to say: the tropics are not chaos, they are order disguised as abundance.
The subject matter might tempt dismissal by some as “hotel art”—those safe, decorative canvases designed to be pleasant backdrops in lobbies and conference rooms, scrubbed clean of specificity. But to call these works as such would be to misread their intention. What we have here is not mere décor, but comfort art—and there is a difference. Hotel art is soulless, a manufactured neutrality. Comfort art, for me, is art that chooses warmth over confrontation, solace over provocation. It acknowledges the necessity of beauty in a world already heavy with fracture.
Consider the piece with the empty chair nestled among heliconias and monstera. It is not just a chair—it is a longing. Someone has just left, or someone is about to arrive. It suggests presence through absence, memory through arrangement. Or the piece of sugarcane trucks lined up on a highway beneath a row of palms: it’s not just a rural roadscape, but a meditation on rhythm and patience, on the pulse of provincial life. These are images that comfort not because they are shallow, but because they are deeply familiar.
There is also something quietly radical about insisting on tropical beauty as subject matter. For too long, the tropics have been exoticized from the outside, or dismissed from within as mere backdrop. Here, the artist reclaims it as central. The leaves, the plants, the cane fields—they are not supporting cast, but protagonists. In an art world that often insists on rupture and dissonance as markers of seriousness, it is refreshing to see someone insist that serenity is just as valid a pursuit.
And this is where Gretchen’s work finds its place within Dumaguete’s art scene. Dumaguete has long been a haven for artists, writers, and performers, but it often leans toward the cerebral and the literary, where provocation is prized and irony is the order of the day. In the visual arts, too, there has been a surge of experimental and conceptual work—installations, mixed media, even performance-based pieces—that speak to the intellectual ferment of the city. Against that backdrop, Gretchen’s watercolors—like that of her comrade in art, Kat Banay—may seem modest, but their modesty is precisely their power.
Her paintings remind us that Dumaguete’s art scene need not only be about breaking forms or pushing limits; it can also be about grounding ourselves in the pleasures of the familiar. In a city by the sea, lined with acacia trees and shadowed by mountains, Gretchen gives us a mirror of the place we already inhabit but often forget to see. Her art is both a celebration and a preservation of the tropical sensibility that marks life in Negros Oriental.
True, the paintings are not ironic. They are not self-consciously clever. But they are sincere, and that sincerity might be the boldest thing about them. They remind us that sometimes the truest art is not the art that unsettles, but the art that steadies. And in their tropical state of mind, these watercolors give us the most necessary of gifts: a space to sit, to look, and to feel at home.
Labels: art, art and culture, dumaguete, friends, negros, painting
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, September 26, 2025
1:06 AM |
No Credit Cards Accepted!
SCENE: A famous restaurant in Dumaguete, has been around for years. I’m with friends.
ME: [Grumbling] I don’t get why some restaurants choose not to accept credit cards, only cash. It’s 2025! You’d think they’d find that a good way to make things convenient for customers.
FRIEND: Well, that way, there’s no definite record of sale. It’s just cash. Then they can cook the books.
ME: But isn’t that bad? Then they don’t declare their taxes properly?
FRIEND: I’ve thought about that. Then I realized all our taxes are going to these trapos in government. I’d rather the money remain with our entrepreneurs.
ME: I’ve never thought about that before.
FRIEND: I don’t even bother to ask for receipts anymore.
This is how we are now in Da Pilipins.
Labels: business, friends, government, life, scandal, tax
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, September 12, 2025
12:31 AM |
The First of Us to Go
This was not our first death in the family. My father died in 1997, when I was in college. Assorted relatives have passed on in the intervening years, including our beloved sister-in-law Efeb, who died in 2024. But Alvin was the first among us brothers to go, and that realization amounted to something tectonic—like a massive shift in our considerations of mortality, like death knocking too intimately at our family’s door.
On the day my brother died, Kuya Moe [Moses Atega] posted on Facebook—as he is wont to do with most alumni of Silliman University—that “the handsomest Casocot brother had passed away.” My Manong Alvin was certainly very handsome, but my brother Rey would probably disagree vehemently.
But let me break it down for you:
Rocky, our eldest, is truly the handsomest.
Edwin is the most ambitious.
Dennis is the most responsible one, and the architect of everything we do as a family. He is the one we turn to the most when we want to get things done.
Rey is the most fabulous and chaotic—and he will, I’m sure, also insist on being the handsomest.
I am, ehem, the most talented.
But Alvin, considering everything, was really the kindest and the sweetest among us six.
Truth to tell, if a gun were pointed at my head and I am forced to answer the question over who my favorite brother is, I’d most probably say, “Alvin.” But I only truly knew him when I was very young. I was in high school when he left for Switzerland in what turned out to be a brief sojourn, and which paved the way for him to eventually enter the United States as a tourist—and where, alas, he decided to turn TNT.
But when I was growing up—and straight on until I was entering my adolescence—Manong Alvin embodied being the “best kuya.” He was very kind, sometimes to a fault. He was compassionate. He was patient. Of all my brothers, he was the one who was most demonstrative of fraternal love—which is an anomaly, because the Casocots as a family is not exactly known for outward displays of affection. [Not that we are cold, either.]
I remember playing crazy rounds of ping pong with him. I remember that he was, among all of us, the best cook. I remember that he was also the most romantic—and always seemed to fall for the same type of woman. Perhaps the Tagalog word “maamo” describes him best—he was mild-mannered, domesticated, affable, possessing a gentle nature. When I ask his high school classmates their memories of him, they recall him as a quiet boy, also someone kind. But because he was very handsome and quiet, girls loved him.
He belonged to SUHS Class 1979, which includes, among many others, Alex Rey Pal, Mark Macias, Emma Ray Panaguiton, Jessica Lupisan, Burton Estolloso, Jun Datu, Vivian Ceniza, and my cousin Gil Moncal Jr. Pastor Jun Datu remembers once calling Alvin, “Tocosac,” a reversal of our family name—to which Alvin amiably retaliated by calling him “Utad”—which actually stuck as a nickname. He also remembers spending many afternoons with my brother in high school playing basketball. “He was not a tall guy,” Pastor Jun remembers. “But he made up for it by being very quick. He was like a cat.” Afterwards, resting from their games, they would troop to buy 25-centavo banana-q at the merkado. “In college, we still played basketball,” he remembers. “But we switched from banana-q to Coke. And also cigarettes. Because we were always hanging out at the house of Burton Estolloso, which had a store.”
I do remember my brother’s favorite cigarette—“Hope Short”—because I was always the one sent on errands to buy this for him when I was growing up.
Another one of his high school friends, Adidas Cañete, remembers him to be quite the ladies’ man—but also one who was quick to share, not just the delicacy of baye-baye my brother would bring to Dumaguete from home in Bayawan, but also answers to exam questions. In college, they were also part of a clique they called Addax—a reworking of the word “barkada” which was apparently bestowed on them by former Dumaguete City Mayor Ipe Remollo. “Alvin was mostly the serious type but he got along well with the rowdy group,” Adidas remembers.
At his memorial last Thursday night, which was sponsored by his high school classmates, I couldn’t help but think about some of the “What If’s” of my brother’s life. Earlier that day, I had spent the morning choosing the best photo of him to print out and put in a frame, to grace the glass top of his casket. I chose the one where he looked the most promising—a choice cut from a family photo taken at a popular studio [Image Bank!] in Dumaguete, circa 1990. He was very handsome in this photo, and he must have been 27 years old. I think he had just gotten back to Dumaguete after spending a year or two in Manila, where he was hopping from one job to the next, never finding one that stuck. He had graduated from Silliman University with a degree in Civil Engineering in 1985, a year or two later than his original cohort; afterwards, he had failed the board exam—which surprised my family, because he was smart, and he was very good with numbers. He never bothered taking the board again.
A year or two after this photo was taken, he embarked on an OFW life in Switzerland—which, alas, did not pan out as planned. That’s when we found out he had gone to the U.S., ostensibly to visit—but had made the decision to stay on illegally. We would eventually find out he had married a Filipino immigrant, and had two children with her. [He also adopted her eldest boy.] We lost touch, only to find out again that they had divorced but that their sons were living with him and his mother-in-law, in difficult circumstances. The correspondences were not consistent, until we learned that he had gotten sick. In 2019, we had to bring him back home to the Philippines.
I asked myself: What if he did not study civil engineering? I don’t really think it was the path he wanted to take—only the path he was expected to take. What if he had become a chef? He was very good at cooking, and I remember him being passionate about it. But in the 1980s, I’m not sure that was even a consideration—certainly an “impractical” one. So he ended taking up civil engineering—which, alas, he did not come to practice anyway.
I asked myself: What if he did not go to Switzerland, and eventually to the United States? I knew he really wanted to stay in the Philippines—but there was pressure on him to leave, “to help the family,” especially in the direst of our financial worries—and truth to tell, there was also pressure to get him away from a girlfriend my family did not approve of. [So much drama!] His life never gained traction in America, especially considering his circumstances. But he did have family, and having his sons Bryan, Christian, and Darrell in our lives—albeit so far away in Los Angeles—is a blessing that could not have happened, if he had not gone to the U.S.
I asked these difficult questions because I love my brother, even when he became the paragon of potential thwarted. Because most of his life, he was always searching for himself and what he could be in this world. I think the life I have chosen to live is mostly a response to my older brother’s chosen pathway. For me, my Manong Alvin taught me—although indirectly—to follow my own dreams, and to carve out a path that would be the making and fulfilment of my potentials.
I do wish though that I was a better brother when he finally came back to the Philippines in 2019, more than twenty years since I last saw him. His body was already ravaged by Lubag, a type of Parkinson’s that comes from Panay. He could no longer communicate well, and I admit that made me uncomfortable, because the Alvin in my memory was someone active, someone articulate, someone who embraced me with so much affection. My heart broke for the man I saw in a wheelchair, and who could not speak.
In the early hours of September 10, in his bedroom at our house in Bantayan, his caregiver heard him mumble incoherently, a sound, she later told me, that sent chills down her spine. When she checked on him again by 5 AM, he was no longer breathing. A homecare nurse finally came by at 8 AM to officially pronounce him dead. To us and to many of his friends, it was a much-needed rest to what had been a physical torment. Knowing even that, it is never easy to grapple with a death in the family. There’s a hole now in each of us.
I still want to remember him the way he was in my younger years. In the summation of our lives, we are measured by the fond memories of those who love of us, who remember us in our best moments, in our fullest potential. My Manong Alvin deserves that.
Labels: death, family, friends, life, memories, obituary
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, August 26, 2025
11:00 PM |
I Will Never Have a Meaningful Talk With You Again
I have cut off “conversational privileges” from people. Two, in particular.
The first was curious: I didn’t know why I always felt deflated after talking to this person. Then I told myself, “Observe closely.” That’s when I noticed that while she would talk to me in a motherly way, the core of her message was apparently always, “You’re not good enough,” or “You’re wrong”—but coated with sweet words and even sweeter tones.
The second one was much the same. I would tell her of things that happened to me, often things that hurt me, and her responses were always to take the position of Devil’s advocate, making me doubt my own story. “Are you sure?” she would always say, always. Like, YEAH, I’m sure.
I value friends who tell me the truth, who call my bullshit, but when the negativity borders on the toxic and the pathological and the unempathetic, I need to draw the line. Both of these people are still friends of mine, but I try not to have deep conversations with them anymore.
I think of it as an editing of my own life, this pruning of conversation. It’s not about canceling people, or slamming the door on friendship; it’s more like quietly deciding which room in my house they’re allowed in, and for how long. Some people, I’ve realized, belong only in the living room, where the polite small talk resides, the weather and the traffic and the latest gossip about who married whom. Others, the rarer ones, are granted entry into the kitchen, where the smells of food and the intimacy of hunger live. The fewest are ushered into the bedroom, where the soul is naked and the conversation unfurls like secrets spoken in whispers.
It takes me a long time to make these categorizations because I am a sentimental fool. I want to believe that everyone means well, and I cling to the idea that if I give them enough chances, they will eventually rise to the occasion of kindness. But life keeps teaching me otherwise. There are people who will always lace their words with hidden barbs, and there are those who wear skepticism like a second skin, unable to resist the itch of doubt. And when you’ve been gutted enough times, you learn to protect the soft parts of yourself.
I suppose this is part of growing older, too. The curation of one’s inner circle. When I was younger, I wanted everyone to like me, and I mistook criticism for care. I told myself, “At least they’re paying attention.” But I now know that attention is not always love, and words that dress themselves as concern can sometimes be the most insidious form of harm. It’s like poison in small doses: you don’t notice it at first, until your body learns the pattern of sickness that follows every encounter.
Cutting off conversational privileges is my antidote. It is my way of saying: I deserve peace. My spirit is not an endless sponge for other people’s projections of inadequacy. My story is not a courtroom where I must defend my pain with receipts and affidavits. I have the right to speak and be believed. And if someone I call a friend cannot give me that, then friendship with them must be relegated to the shallow end of the pool, where the water never reaches the heart.
And so I keep my circle, smaller and smaller. But in its shrinking comes clarity. There are friends who tell me the truth in ways that do not wound unnecessarily. There are friends who, when I falter, say, “I see you, I hear you, I believe you,” before they ever say, “But have you considered this other perspective?” That’s how empathy works: not the bulldozing of another’s story with counterarguments, but the holding of that story with tenderness until it can be examined together.
I do not think I am alone in this curation. I know people who have done the same thing, often in silence, because how do you tell a friend, “I can’t talk deeply with you anymore because your words hurt me”? Sometimes it’s easier to just redirect conversations to neutral territories, to laugh over shared memories, to text emojis instead of paragraphs. The friendship continues, but with boundaries. Boundaries, after all, are not walls; they are fences with gates, and you decide when to open them.
The older I get, the more I believe that conversation is sacred. It is, in a way, the very architecture of friendship. We build each other in the words we exchange: the affirmations, the confidences, the jokes that stitch days together. To guard this architecture is not selfishness, but self-preservation. Because if you keep letting termites chew at the beams, one day the house of your spirit will collapse.
So yes, I have cut off conversational privileges. And yes, it sometimes feels cruel, even cowardly. But it is also necessary. I have learned to honor the weight of my own spirit. I have learned to be a careful steward of my own voice. And in this stewardship comes an unexpected gift: the conversations that remain, the ones I still have with the chosen few, are richer, deeper, filled with laughter that heals instead of barbs that wound.
Labels: enemies, friends, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, August 24, 2025
9:00 AM |
A Small Garden Party
There are days that unfurl so perfectly that you can only count them among the blessings that make life bearable, even luminous. They arrive like small benedictions, reminding you that there is still some sweetness in being alive, that there is still a feast to be had even in the shadows.
For me, that day arrived on the 17th of August this year, a surprisingly bright Sunday in the middle of a month known for its turbulent weather. But thank God for that sunny, breezy day, because I finally fulfilled a wish I had carried since I was a high schooler watching too many European films. Those films—you know the ones, where the camera lingers on a long table laden with fantastic dishes, under a tree, filled with people laughing or breaking bread, as if an eternity is contained in an afternoon—imprinted on me a vision of how a meal among friends can be a communion, a reminder that the good life is not about grand gestures, but about company, food, and the presence of trees. For decades, it was only that, a cinematic fantasy. At my age, alas I still do not have the sprawling villa, nor the terraced gardens with ancient stone, nor the long rustic table that had seen the weight of generations. I only had the wish and the fantasy.
But turning fifty has a way of rearranging your sense of what is possible. There is no more time for the “someday.” If not now, then when? If not in this life, then never. And so, with my significant other, Renz, I said: Why not now? And why not here, in the Maghanoy compound in Taclobo, that patch of memory and inheritance first secured by Renz’s grandfather in 1989?
A garden is still a garden, and a long table for a meal is only a matter of assembling chairs and flat surfaces and linen. And besides, isn’t that the point of dreams—that they don’t require perfection, only the courage to enact them in the form that life allows?
And so, we did it.
We borrowed the tables and the chairs and the linen from a good friend, Marikit Armogenia, who gave us not just furniture but a sense of welcome, a gesture of generosity that made the whole endeavor feel more grounded in community. We adorned them with the blossoms that have always meant happiness to me—the radiant yellow of the chrysanthemum. The bundles of flowers—a gift of my Manila-based friend Ted Regencia—sat in vases like bursts of small suns, uncomplicated but enough to light the air with cheer.
We laid out food that felt like home: escabeche from Lab-as, with its balance of tang and sweetness—facilitated by Tita Macrina Fuentes and my high school classmate Sande; smoky and tender lechon manok and liempo from Golden Roy’s—facilitated by my old high school teacher, Ma’am Cassion; and from Renz’s magic hands, chicken curry fragrant with spices, the [slightly] bitter honesty of ampalaya salad, and the earthy freshness of pako salad, a taste that spoke of mountains and streams—and the way my mother exactly prepared them for me when I was growing.
This spread of my favorite food [and flowers] made less for spectacle and more for satisfaction, the kind of presentation that doesn’t need to be fussed over because it already lives in the bloodstream of our memories.
And then my people arrived—a carefully selected list of 15, agonizingly pared down from higher numbers I could not accommodate for logistics reasons. Ernest and Gayle Acar. Karl and Gail Villarmea. Hersley and Toulla Casero. Mohammed Malik and Finola Uy. Lyde Gerard Villanueva. Justine Megan Yu. Tara De Leon. Kaycee Melon. Warlito Caturay Jr. Alana Narciso. Khail Campos Santia. And Tita Melisa Maghanoy, Renz’s mom. People who represented aspects of me, barring those who could not come for some reason or other. Each one was a reminder that a life is not measured in what you’ve hoarded but in who has chosen to sit at your table. These fifteen guests filled the garden with laughter, with stories, with the heat of shared presence. A beautiful crowd for a beautiful day.
I called it a “literary lunch.” Because books and words have always been the meat of my life, and because it felt right to give the occasion a shape beyond food and fellowship. So I asked everyone to speak of gratitude—but with a rule: no mentioning of husbands or children, since they were already a given. Gratitude must be about the self, the singular joys, the quiet triumphs, the overlooked grace notes that make up one’s song. It was astonishing to hear the answers, little confessions of bliss that reminded me how textured life can be, how rich we all are if only we bothered to take inventory of our small joys.
Then I read to them “The 50 Gratitudes,” the essay I had written for and of myself for this occasion, a litany of thanks for the years and the loves and the accidents that have brought me here. I bundled it with two other pieces I had written for my birthday month [“The Confessions of Secondhand Rose” and “My Mother, The Muse”] and made a zine, my little giveaway for the day, because what is a birthday if not also a chance to give back the words that have sustained me? To see my friends leaf through those stapled pages, to hold in their hands my attempt at summing up half a century—it was my way of saying, “Here, take a piece of me with you, because you are already part of my story.”
Fifty as an age can a frightening number. You wake up to it and realize you have been on earth for half a century, that you are no longer the “young one” in the room, that your body creaks with the accumulation of time.
But I think fifty is also a tender number. It carries not just the weight of age, but the buoyancy of having survived, of having made it this far despite everything. It whispers: look around, you are still here. And what better way to mark it than to sit under the trees, at a long table, in the company of those who matter, and to say: thank you, thank you, thank you.
Because a good day is never just a day. It is a culmination of every choice, every act of courage, every hand extended to you in love. A good day is the flowering of roots you sometimes forget you planted. And a good life, if we are lucky, is only a constellation of such days, strung together until they shine enough to light the rest of the journey.
That August 17 Sunday was one such day. I think of it now with the certainty that whatever lies ahead, I have already known joy.
Labels: birthday, friends, life
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Wednesday, March 05, 2025
10:00 PM |
An 11-Year Belated Inuman
Eleven years ago, before Bing Vee and Karl Villarmea became parents, we had our usual get-together at Hayahay, to do our usual pahungaw about life and work, but we could not finish this flat of Tanduay when it was time to go home. [It was an extra bottle that Karl brought.] We promised each other we would finish it soon. That never happened. What happened was life itself. And kids. These two had kids. And so I kept this Tanduay in my refrigerator for all those eleven years, waiting for our next inuman to happen. [So yes, this Tanduay is older than their children!] That inuman finally happened tonight. I was reeling from the gravity of the UNESCO application, and I said: “I need my old friends with me, I need to drink!” Maygani these two made time, kay busy baya mi. Og kay tigulang na pud mi, we scheduled our Tandy inuman in the late afternoon [5 PM!] at the posh Esturya. And I am so proud nga nahurot namong tulo ang usa ka flat! Hahaha.Labels: friends, life
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Sunday, December 22, 2024
9:00 AM |
All My Accidental Christmas Cheers
It is harder to feel Christmas when you’re older. The holidays harden into a mercenary plot that defies whatever magical understanding we used to have of it when we were children, when even the slightest Christmassy thing had the sheen of absolute joy and we were still given to believing that Santa Claus existed. Now, I am nearing 50 years old, alive for almost half a century already, and even I know—from what scraps of memory science I have read—to cast doubts whether the Christmases I remember when I was young were truly as joyful as I remember them to be. Or is this just nostalgia talking? I have learned since then that the memories we have are actually palimpsests of other memories of the same thing—and never the thing itself; in other words: ghosts upon ghosts piling together to create an image of the past that might not have been. I have not believed in Santa since I was ten; at near-fifty, I no longer believe in memories either.
Even then, an optimistic part of me still behold these memories as a kind of sacred ghost. How can I not? The ones that I have the sharpest recall of are taken from the years in my family’s life when we were poorest: for most of the 1980s we rented a ramshackle downstairs “apartment” of an old house somewhere in the bowels of Tubod, complete with an outhouse for a toilet—really what you would call a pit latrine; and “ramshackle” this apartment might have been, but somehow my mother and older brothers made into livable quarters through sheer ingenuity. [I say ingenuity because I’ve visited this apartment again only a couple of years ago for a documentary—and it is ghastly, and made me think: how were we able to live in this godforsaken place for quite a number of years?] And yet, this place is where most of my cherished Christmas memories are located.
I remember the night my brother Rocky came home from Cebu, and asked us kids to catch the shower of gold coins he flung to the air from a couple of bank pouches. We scrambled like mad, and with such joy, to collect what we could. [Those “gold” coins were newly-minted 25 centavo pieces, which at the time were just released as legal tender, dating this memory to 1983.]
I remember all the noche buenas we’ve had in that apartment, which was always swarming with friends and visitors. Those noche buenas must have been very simple—but for a kid not used to a regular feast, a Tupperware full of spaghetti [or chicken salad, which was my brother Rey’s specialty], a ham gifted by some friend, and plentiful rice must have been the very vision of wealth.
I remember my brother Edwin buying us our first Christmas tree. This was already in a time, perhaps around 1988, when we could finally breathe a little easy finances-wise, but that trek with my mother and my brother to Nijosa, and choosing just the one perfect plastic Christmas fir tree for the family to enjoy, and choosing the tinsels and decorations and lights to go with it—finally signaled to my boyhood consciousness that perhaps our fortunes have changed, and perhaps we did not have to go hungry anymore. After all, we just bought a Christmas tree!
I’m sure these memories are real. My remembrances of them may be palimpsests—but I am also aware that these memories are what makes me a human uniquely myself. Largely jaded I may have become, but these memories serve a purpose of reminding me I was once a boy full of Christmas brightness [that kid catching those gold coins], and fulfillment [that kid sated with simple noche buena], and hope [that kid happy with his new Christmas tree]. After all these years, these memories are still the kindling that sparks some joy in me come Christmas time, although the sparks have been muted by time and the joy blunted by the very adult reality of the withering world around us.
Christmas is really for children, no?
Christmas for adults is dancing unwillingly in a program for an office party.
Christmas for adults is all the utang paid after getting your 13th-month pay.
Christmas for adults is fretting over all kinds of holiday anxieties—the gifts to give, the parties to attend, the cards to send out.
In adulthood, I know I’ve tried my best to hang on to the magic of Christmas. I would attend the family Christmas dinners on the eve of the celebrations—although of late they have become obligations rather than a source of joy; I would listen to a personal playlist of Christmas songs that constituted mostly the Christmas albums released by The Carpenters—although admittedly I would play these songs mostly in July [don’t ask why]; I would foment new Christmas rituals, like watching annually a bunch of movies that made me feel Christmas joy—among them, Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, A Charlie Brown Christmas, When Harry Met Sally..., and It’s a Wonderful Life, but I have not actually done this since the pandemic. One time, to make the family Christmas dinner more personal, I attempted to make curated and handmade gifts for everyone—which was something completely out of the blue because my family never give each other Christmas gifts. The effect I was going for did not come to fruition, so I never did it again. I think it was that one Christmas that I finally grew up and told myself to stop trying too hard.
That realization of not trying too hard has been a gift. Because these days, I find Christmas joy in the accidental things. Like, one time, I was in Manila in early December and just happened to wander into a park somewhere in Makati—and right at that moment, a cascade of brilliant lights suddenly covered everything. It felt truly magical, because unexpected.
Or that time we were navigating holiday traffic from Cebu to Dumaguete, and we were trapped waiting for the next ferry to take us from Bato to Tampi, and while we waited in the light of stars of early evening, a bunch of folk singers sang daygon—or traditional Christmas songs in Binisaya—to us. That felt like a blessing.
Or this year, when all thoughts of celebrating Christmas was erased by the specter of a semester ending in December. While other people thought of parties and gifts, my only focus was on completing students’ requirements and grading—a backbreaking effort that nullified any kind of holiday cheer. But I hastily accepted some intimate Christmas dinners—and they have been lovely. A soothing balm for a harried soul, a reminder that we are still human despite our anxieties and expectations.
Once this very same December, on a particularly fretful day, Renz took me to dinner at Meltin’ Pot, at their new branch along Hibbard Avenue. He wanted to eat ramen, and I wanted sushi. Out of the blue, while we were waiting for our food to arrive, a youth group came in, asked permission to serenade all of us in the premises with Christmas songs [for a “donation,” of course], and proceeded to give us a number of songs of high octane holiday cheer. That made me smile.
This is me wishing everyone—cheerful child or jaded adult—the best of Christmas cheer, accidental or not.
Dinner with the Antonios, hosted by Jacqueline Veloso-Antonio and Myrish Cadapan-Antonio.
Dinner with the Sincos [Stephen, Mira, and Luis] and Arlene Delloso, with Renz Torres
Labels: christmas, dumaguete, family, friends, life, memories
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Sunday, November 03, 2024
Tonight, we celebrated Dessa Quesada-Palm's 60th birthday, in a lovely dinner and program with her friends of a lifetime at Essencia — and it was, to be honest, one of the most meaningful birthday celebrations I have ever come to witness. By the end of it, I was teary-eyed [and I never usually get teary-eyed at birthdays]. In occasions such as this, it's usual to have birthday greetings and speeches dedicated to the celebrator, but in the hands of a consummate theater artist like Dessa, each speech came at suitable intervals in a perfectly directed biographical narrative [with a good Powerpoint show to guide everyone]. And each speech was given by a perfectly handpicked friend or family representing an aspect or a major episode in Dessa's fruitful life — from her days as a member of the Quesada household [speech by sister Mae Quesada-Medina], from her life with PETA [speech by film director Avic Ilagan], from her days studying in New York [speech by composer Lerrick Santos], from early days in Dumaguete doing theatre workshops with the Divinity School [speech by Jean Cuanan-Nalam], from her almost two decades of mentoring YATTA [speech by Mellard Chiong Manogura], and from her love life [speech by her husband Colby Palm], interspersed with a monologue from Dessa's play Rape Buzz performed by Mayumi Maghuyop, improv comedy from the YATTA OGs Hope Tinambacan, Junsly Kitay, and Nikki Cimafranca, and music with the Quiz Family Singers, and the trio of Sharon Dadang-Rafols, Jean Nalam, and Dessa herself. At the end, she considered everyone in attendance and how each one has come to mean something significant in her life [it is at this point that I would finally break down and cry], and ended the evening with a song that she uses as her answer to the question: “What makes a meaningful life?”
Mother, you make 60 look fabulous. You have touched so many lives, and thank you for making Dumaguete your home, and the base of your theatrical gifts.
Labels: birthday, friends, people, theatre
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Saturday, September 07, 2024
9:00 PM |
I Like My Saturday
I like this Saturday. I had things to do but I also mostly followed my feet, letting things flow organically without letting a schedule determine things. Turns out, it was a perfect way to meet and spend time with good friends — and we didn’t even have to make appointments with each other! What a way to see Ernest and Gayle and Poc and Shimei and Vince and Toulla and Hersley…
And then, of course, the s.o. is finally home from Vietnam! Here's us with hugs all around with his mom and aunties.
Labels: dumaguete, friends, life, love
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Wednesday, June 05, 2024
I’m full of gratitude today. It’s one of those days that make me realize there are people in the world who do care for me, and are there for me, and who wish me well. They know who they are, all the people I’ve interacted with today. Thank you.
Also, I finally finished writing this story! Finished it while waiting for my turn at my dentist’s clinic! [Note: I began writing this in 2009, and it has taken me fifteen years to finish it.]
Also, after months of quietly suffering, I fixed my dental issues and can finally eat properly! [But it was actually my dentist who texted me I needed to go to his clinic ASAP yesterday, without appointment. And then
gihatod ko pauli. Full dental care!] Thanks, Xandro Dael!
Labels: friends, health, life, writing
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Wednesday, April 17, 2024
Life throws you punches, the grind can be backbreaking, and doubts will forever confound and dishearten. But thank God for friends who believe in what you're doing. They are the best kinds of people.Labels: friends, life
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Tuesday, October 24, 2023
6:49 AM |
The Hive at The Henry!
It has been a while since The Hive all had a good dinner together. This photo is incomplete, so many friends and our partners missing, but hopefully we can reunion again with more of us present. Thank you, Ram Benedicto Reambonanza Jr., for gathering all of us last night at Popolo at The Henry! The pandemic taught me a lot about the value of friendship. These faces [and the others not here] will always be a magnificent cornerstone of my life.
Labels: friends, life
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Saturday, October 07, 2023
1:59 PM |
Jean Reading
It always feels like an honor and privilege when people send me videos of them reading
The Great Little Hunter aloud to their children. I mean, that's the best kind of validation, right? When your target audience is truly enjoing, and learning from, a story you've written for them? This is my friend Jean Cuanan-Nalam reading to her boy. Thank you, Jean!
You can get your copy of the softbound edition at this
link.
Labels: books, children's books, friends, philippine literature
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Monday, August 28, 2023
And with that, high school reunion season comes to a close. We had our farewell dinner at The Vineyard, and capped a reunion that included three wildly different dinners [last night at Hayahay was apparently dedicated to old-time debauchery], a community outreach program, and a parade. I missed our 25th year reunion, but resolved to join our 30th because it was such a milestone. It turned out to be pretty much an emotional one for everyone as well, and I’ve noticed that everyone was so ready to be vulnerable, to tell everyone we love them and miss them, to express gratefulness, to give endless hugs. Tonight, near the end of the dinner, the host made us do an impromptu communal singing of “That’s What Friends Are For,” and after initially giggling because it was so corny, everyone nevertheless gravitated towards forming a large circle, and — holding hands and swaying to the melody — we sang the song out loud with what I sincerely believe to be heartfelt gusto. When will I ever see these people again? Who knows? That’s the beauty of life’s flows and impermanence: they make nights like this meaningful and beautiful.
Happy 122nd Founders Day, Silliman University!
Labels: friends, high school, life, memories, silliman
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