Food actually

NetnetCamomot

I’M looking out of the window again. Green trees.Sunny weather.

In other parts of the country and the world, typhoons are arriving, brewing, or leaving. Cagayan de Oro is spared for now, with Typhoon Lawin hovering above Luzon. Lawin as in hawk.

Birds—no hawks, though—fly overhead until they land on top of a window, chirping and adding drama to the room with a view.

Now, drama is one thing you can live without. There’s enough drama already the moment you wake up and limp to the bathroom with the recovering knee. Recovering like a person with substance use disorder (PSUD). Kind of.But not quite. A PSUD has way more challenges ahead as he avoids the substances he’s addicted to.

So, you choose to laugh and squeeze a joke out of the drama. There’s Wanda Sykes guesting on Ellen DeGeneres’s show. Sykes says, “I never thought that I would need plastic surgery. But Donald Trump has cracked my face. I have permanent creases right here (she points to the space between her eyebrows) ‘cause I’m always… He’ll say something, and I’m like, What the hell did he just say? And now, I have a ditch right here (touches the space inbetween her brows again) in the middle of my forehead.”

We may not have a Trump in the Philippines but our forehead may also develop a ditch soon, what with all the drama in the Senate and Congressional hearings on whatever they’re trying to decipher nowadays.

Newspapers are again piling up in one corner of my room, no thanks to my new source of news: Facebook, where one gets a blow-by-blow account of anything through Facebook Live and the TV networks’ live coverage. This is one social network that has simplified our life—no need to buy newspapers or a TV set. Or even go to a movie house to, well, watch movies.

One night several months ago, someone shared a link to “Me Before You,” and I was like a happy puppy, grateful for discovering such a wonderful gift. It was towards the end of the film that I realized, Oh, I’m watching this on the phone. The tablet and laptop would have provided better viewing. Bright gyud.

I also watched “Love Actually” for the nth time on that same phone. O my gas.

Watching movies this way may also cause a ditch on the forehead, but don’t worry, be happy, for the president’s “taken-out-of-context” statements may erase that ditch as he continues to blurt out Putang Ina. Saying it as it is, is freedom at its best. No frills, no pa-cute, no pa-sweet.

But PI—the curse, not Philippine Islands—may have lost its charm once he compared his war against drugs to Hitler’s attempted annihilation of a race, prompting you to think, Nah, this is not cute anymore.

President RodyDuterte would have been a public relations nightmare if not for his war against drugs which has endeared him to Pinoys who have had enough of the drug menace. Well, it’s working, right? Effective? Banished drugs off the barangays?

But those were the first 100 days, we’re now in the second 100 days, and there will be more 100 days in his six-year term. Divide the term into these small packets of days. One day at a time.

The barangay and SangguniangKabataan elections have been postponed to next year, to avoid the temptation of using drug money for the expected vote-buying. Sales at malls and department stores have reportedly decreased due to the reduced circulation of drug money. This is alarming: You mean to say, this country had survived before Duterte’s term, thanks to drugs. And all along we thought the remittances from overseas contract workers kept the economy afloat.

Let’s see if the smoking ban will result to a decrease in cigarette sales. Hmmm.

Will there ever be a ban on drinking? Alcohol destroys the liver, and even limbs and lives since the Philippines still needs a strict implementation of DUI—drinking under the influence—laws, which brings us to this question: Does the country even have such a law. For now, the Catholic Pinoy has to make the sign of the cross each time his friend is driving with tunnel vision.

The solution to any addiction is to not start a bad habit at all. Once upon a time, I would smoke a cigarette—only one stick—each week while drinking a few bottles of light beer. Few as in one or two. This was older age already and not tequila-and-vodka age, thus, the one lonely cig and light beer. And my youngest brother asked me, Why are you still smoking? I replied, It’s just one stick! Bro: Yeah, but you’re still smoking. Then, he began lecturing me about how my lungs have to recover each time. Well, that stopped me.

There are days when I’m writing this column and I crave for that cigarette. It’s the huffing and puffing and holding that stick. I do that now with turrones de mani—haha!—like a little girl smoking and pretending to be a grownup. The turrones that I also have to avoid due to the mani and the other chemicals in there.

I’m now back to protein shakes, fish, and veggies, the meal plan that the wellness coach prepared last Sept. 3. Had I followed that since then, I would have lost ten pounds instead of gaining ten pounds. Gawd. This diet is easy to follow when you’re home with nothing else inside the fridge except for the protein shake, fish, and veggies. But once you fill up the fridge with more, there will always be that temptation to eat more. And once you’re out of the house, happy days are here again!

For now, the small fridge in the room has ube jam all the way from Baguio—thanks much, Sis—and chocolates. Yay. Better look out of the window again and stare at the trees.