2:30 am
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Today’s youth are able to harness digital technology to show how they will look like when they’re fifty and up. I do not know how knowing their physical appearance then will help them age gracefully, which involves more than just handling changing looks.

My contemporaries did not have this opportunity for imagination. We went on with life as we thought it should, or often, as our old folk thought it would.

In my mind, my female friends are forever alternately innocent and capricious, and sympathetic and critical, and my male pals, alternately generous and unforgiving, and affectionate and distant.

To this day, at sixty, I see myself at age five, wearing an unusual cap and standing before a birthday cake Mommy took pains to highlight a simple party for me.

I see myself at a much younger age, flanked by Mommy and her officemates and a wee bit overdressed in my favourite red dress, overlooking the famed Balara Filters, then a popular week-end local tourist destination in Quezon City.

I see myself at age ten, awfully fat and dwarfed by the tall pine trees in Baguio, where I had the fortune of spending a vacation along with my wealthier cousins.

I’ve kept the many pictures of my earlier years and I get pretty nostalgic looking at the girl with the dimples, the thick hair, and the plump physique. My mirror now tells me my eyelids are dangerously close to covering my eyes and my hair is more swiftly graying than my hair dye can keep up with. My skin is not that bad, but the “laugh lines” have proliferated.

I seriously realized I was growing old when, alone in a luxurious hotel room in Melbourne in 1997, I saw that no amount of moisturizer could make the dryness of my skin go away. Since then I haven’t used bar soap to wash make-up off.

In 2000, I gamely scaled a rare prime forest mountain in Antique for a writing assignment. It took me most of a whole day to reach the top. Going down was another story that merits another post. The thought that I had a fighting heart that did not give up despite the beating it got from ascent to descent to the pain of an infected wound was the only good reminder of that experience. A bad dark scar on my leg is the terrible remembrance of that episode in my life’s roller-coaster ride.

From then on, I went downhill, physically. I was diagnosed with gout, and then presented with a list of prohibited foods. I was depressed. I had spent a lifetime of good food (read: often forbidden), and yet my good cholesterol level was better than my bad, and I had no diabetes. Gout was not going to ruin my appetite, if I could cope with the pain of uric acid building up in my joints.

Then I left a high-paying job and was immediately plunged into deeper depression. I did not want to even move at all.

My ambition of aging gracefully has flown out of the window. I admire you, Jim Paredes. It is increasingly becoming difficult to think of aging the way you do. It’s a case of “the flesh is willing, but the spirit is weak”, instead of the other way around.

But then, tomorrow is another day. While I am more fully aware of my mortality now, thinking of tomorrow might just be an indication that I have not truly aged. Is that good or bad?

8:47 pm
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To go out of the house two weeks in a row is now a major accomplishment, given my extreme lack of energy.  But it’s been well worth it:  first, because I was with my children, and second, because I willed myself to enjoy the experience, no matter how mundane or petty.

We watched Ratatouille first time around.  It is a deceptively deep movie:  animated and with a rat as lead character.  The message I shall not delve into here.  Suffice it to say, it was an uncommon film.

The following week, we saw Hairspray.  I have always loved John Travolta, musicals and anything that has to do with my beloeved decade, the sixties.  The film had it all!  We had reserved tickets hours in advance for the screening at the new Trinoma.  For an extra P100, one gets a La-Z Boy seat at the top tiers of the theater, while the rest of the filmgoers stayed in the lower rungs.  Somehow, I missed Gateway’s Globe Platinum theater exclusivity , although one pays much more to gain access.  (For P350, Gateway’s special theater, though, offers bottomless popcorn and drinks!  Sulit!)

Trinoma, because it is new, was an object of curiosity.  It gleams in chrome, glass and marble.  The shops (not all have opened at the time) displayed their best and most timely merchandise. Such temptations!  But as usual, I opted for reading materials and came away with a new book by Jane Fitch of White Oleander fame.  (Powerbooks was on sale and I used my daughter’s card, so I saved about P60 on my purchase.)

I liked Le Maison fine dining resto. although our entire lunch bill ate a significant portion of my budget.

I entered Hedalthy Options for some sunflower seeds and a little pistachio, which were both expensive, organic as they are, as claimed.

The second outing was on a rainy day, but again, I enjoyed it, even if enjoyment seems rare for me now.  Jaded?  Nah…just getting old.  And getting old need not be such a downer.

10:44 pm
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I must mention the recently concluded One Town One Product Luzon (OTOP) Island Trade Fair mounted by the Department of Trade and Industry.  I was impressed and excited.

My friend May invited me  one week-end to visit the venue.  It was also an opportunity for us to bond, though briefly.  She hails from San Fernando City and is therefore limited by space and time spending more time with friends from Metro Manila.

It was one of the rare times I found the chance to drop by such an event and, sucker that I am for shopping, especially for food, tried hard to drag myself from my comfort zone to go.

I have always loved the Mountain Province and the Ilocos Region and remember both mostly for their food.  I am familiar with Nueva Ecija gustatory offerings as well because of my work with agriculture people.

And, I have always loved pili nuts from Bicol, so…I went home with a couple of Ilocos woven blankets, Nueva Ecija carabao milk products and its “batutay”, roasted, salted and sugar-coated pili nuts and bonbons from Bicol,  strawberry vinegar and unoy rice from the Mountain Province.    I tasted Kalinga coffee for P20 a styrofoam glass, but forgot to return to buy a pack of the stuff.

My daughter went back for a handbag from a fair booth,that cost almost three times more at a mall shop. 

We could have purchased more  but I was afraid it would be difficult to lug home more than we could carry.

I don’t know if we got the goods at bargain prices, but never mind.  (The next day, an magazine column quoted Lydia Castillo purchasing half a kilo of “batutay” for onlyP95; I got mine at the Fair for P110.   Well, I consoled myself by thinking what I got was the real thing.  I had asked the Igorot lady (wo)manning the rice booth if unoy was available in the Metro, and she replied that what was available here was “fake”.  She probably meant “hybrid unoy”.  She said their unoy is already being exported to US Montana (a company or the state?),  that she and her group will be back in November yet and that the only place where their unoy is being sold in the metropolis is in Alabang.  It figures:  one kilo of unoy costs P100!

I have always spent much on food. I rarely regret it.  The OTOP affair boosted my energy and appetite!

7:39 am
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My cousin Nina reports that the weather in New York City is terrible this summer, worse than she ever encountered in Dubai or at the height of summer in the Philippines.  It just goes to show that we can’t have it all.  Nina once said that having lived and worked in New York is the best experience ever for anyone, that, having been a New Yorker for more than a decade, she has had the best of it all.  It now seems like this doesn’t include the erratic weather in the most colorful city of them all.

But then, the weather elsewhere in the world has been erratic in the last few years.  I, for one, do not remember having weather this hot in my youth.  It is now July, when “normal weather” would be wet in the Philippines and somehow a lot cooler that one would need a thin blanket to keep warm in bed.  But it is still “sweaty” weather, and the rains have not fallen in torrents the way they used to.  The humidity has gone down, but it still is not “bed weather” in the Philippines, not in Manila anyway.  Elsewhere in the Philippines, rain has been falling copiously.  My producer reported night rains in Mindanao.  In fact, her trip was cancelled the previous week because of foul weather in the island.

So, has the world turned around…really turned around? 

10:59 am
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Please email me at:  jenferam@gmail.com