The Weekend (late post)

Dear Diary,
My sister Binky had a diary, pretty sure she did. As a child, most of my thoughts weren’t really about my feelings so I guess there was no compulsion to write them down. And hard to believe, but whatever fantasy world I created and was living in, I was actually happy in it.

Plus, my penmanship was horrible. Still is.

One of my creative writing classes at the UP was memoir writing and I went all in. At the end of the semester, it was over a hundred pages long, held together by a binder clip, typed single-spaced and filled with sketches, collage and paintings. Ninety-eight percent of it wasn’t real of course- my life then was nothing, but in my head it was rich, boundless and exuberant.

I lost that book after showing it to someone and I still mourn its loss to this day.

I found an old Moleskine notebook that I started writing on in December 2019 with the entries petering out when the Covid lockdowns happened and I thought why not, let’s continue writing and recording if only for the simple and uncomplicated reason of writings for it’s own sake.

Cassia
So Michelin stars were given out recently to a smattering of New Zealand restaurants and while Cassia was on the guide, it didn't get a star. Not that it matters. We’ve been wanting to try it out for the longest time and when we did, they were in the middle of a renovation. So the new (pop-up) location is at this Grey Lynn cafe called Ozone.

The cafe leases its space so the restaurant staff literally carts all their stuff in and then out every single night; they could have closed temporarily, but…

The only drawback is that we were offered an abbreviated, but still very satisfying menu. Spoiler alert if you ever book before they reopen (with a full menu) sometime in August- don’t order the curries (there are only three anyway). If the sirloin steak with rogan josh was any indication, it was just okay and not Michelin okay. We figured that a sampling of the smaller plates would have been the better strategy, but three outstanding entries in spite of their size, was quite filling.

Skip the wine, not that I’d ever order one anyway, but the cocktails were sensational and satisfyingly boozy. It’s a shame to skip the reopening, but we’ve already booked at Ahi- and yes, they do have a Michelin star lol.

Did you know it's 164 days before Christmas?

Our dining table is literally how life seems to be these days; it’s clean and empty at the start of the week, then as the days pass, the surface blooms with books from the library (The Trauma Cleaner, Exhalation by Ted Chiang), stuff from the supermarket waiting for their turn to be stuffed into the pantry (which needs reorganising too), personal cosmetic stuff (because I log the products I buy, what skin concern they’re currently addressing, and what ingredients they have), art stuff (because the table is the de facto work table too) and home DIY stuff (there was a wall-steamer on the table last week, and shelving from Ikea, and this week, a spirit level to hang art that is yet to be created, if I ever get there).

And where did the time go? We all blinked and we’ve eased past the middle part of the year, and the end of it seems so much closer when you have an actual number of days counting down to Christmas. Nobody book ends their year with the New Year btw. So what do I want for Christmas? What do I want to give? Believe it or not, I usually start my lists in June, and then I start buying when sales happen from September to October. Pricier gifts get purchased when there’s enough money saved. I’ve never really cared about ‘budgets’ and even in this economy, I’m not about to start. I’ve given and I’ve received, and each year has been filled with much (material) joy so I’ll leave it at that. When I’m retired and poor, I may need to gift my ‘art’ as gifts, so I better hurry and start now to perfect it; don’t want to be that crazy uncle handing out crafty, tatty shit.

Saturday (morning)

Lily has a routine and she sticks to it no matter what. She paws my face and failing to get a reaction, does it a second time but with her claws out. I hide under the covers, but she just steps right up, literally standing on my face. What about that?

But I can see the sunlight on the deck through the duvet and the promise of a perfectly sunny winter’s day is enough reason to get up (grudgingly) at 7:30am, cat or no cat on top of my face.

I go upstairs and spy the kettlebells. Mmm, maybe later (sore) alligator.

Need to eat and remember that I have those protein oats. I assemble a bowl with banana, berries and granola. I arrange all the components around it and take a photo thinking, well, will you look at that? So social-media worthy..hmmmmm.

Three minutes and 10 seconds later in the microwave, the bowl is a bubbling slate-grey sludge that probably resembles the surface of an alien planet.

But looks aren’t everything, if you don’t know that yet.

I dig into the oats and it’s warm, comforting and delicious.

Sundays

Chicken, chicken (skin) and more chicken.
We had nothing planned for Saturday night dinner, so Papa's Chicken it was — the leftovers of which got paired with ramen the next day. There are a million chicken places out there, some genuinely great (like Papa's), some disappointingly meh (Popeyes, I'm looking at you). Papa's main strength is consistency. I'm partial to their plain, unseasoned, crispy variant, which you can doctor to your own taste — Kikkoman and crispy chilli oil, in my case.

Then the chicken skin arrived. Two kilos of it. I hadn't even realised I'd ordered it, and it came from this online store — the only place I've found that sells it here.

As someone who has become annoyingly snobbish about meat sourcing, I had questions. Is the chicken free-range? What exactly is the quality control on how the skins are processed? Without clear answers, I just ran them under cold water over and over until my hands started to go numb. They're going to be cooked anyway, right?

The best method I've come across is to lay the skins flat on a baking sheet and roast them in batches. I've seen people on social media dump everything into a pot of water and wait for the liquid to evaporate, letting the skins render and fry in their own fat — but I think this is misleading. Unless you're using a brand-new, genuinely non-stick pan, the skins inevitably stick during the boiling phase and tear when you try to work them off with a spatula. (I used a non-stick pan. They still stuck.) That said, I do see the merit of a quick parboil beforehand to take the edge off that intense, barnyard chickeny smell.

Yes, keto people will tell you chicken skin is practically a health food. And while rendered chicken crackling is genuinely delicious, let's not kid ourselves — it's still mostly fat. We treat it as a treat.

And because the crackling had left us with a nice pool of rendered chicken fat, and we had some large chicken legs sitting in the freezer, it seemed only logical to make chicken inasal for dinner. Sort of. I didn't actually have cane vinegar, calamansi, or lemongrass — so it was inasal in spirit and appearance, if not entirely in flavour. It's been a while, honestly, and I can't even recall with any certainty how it's supposed to taste.

One last thing: there's a US lobby group that flatly declares that chicken is not a healthy food choice. Take that with an enormous grain of salt — it's an American organisation, after all, and they have their own agenda to push. As they always do.

Questions that (sometimes) keep me up at night

Yes L; there are some questions that keep me up night.

  1. Where and how can I get that miracle drug that will add another 30 years to our cat’s life?

  2. When really, will I start getting actual wrinkles??

  3. How do I deal with pubic hair turning white?? Does it matter?

  4. Is there an endgame to Philippine politics?

  5. Where and how do you begin therapy and recovery for artistic atrophy?? For what ends??

  6. Should I just start writing??

  7. How can I admit that I really don’t like salmon that much?

  8. How do you know that you have enough clothes??

  9. Is sex work really that bad???

  10. Can one start all over again with art?

city on the cusp of winter

Auckland’s weather has been described as having a warm, oceanic climate with distinct sub-tropical influences, which means warm, humid summers and mild, wet winters. Saturday was dipping just above 10 degrees, but after walking about 2 km from Symonds all the way to the viaduct with precise, well-timed stops at a specialist optometrist store, a newly opened Asian bakery and a small snobbish boutique stocking Celine & Loewe, it was hot.

We have small coffees at a Starbucks and loiter at Britomart a bit at the large public square called Te Komitititanga. This is the tourist part of the city which funnels an endless stream of people taking the ferries back and forth to Waiheke, Davenport, Pine Harbour & Great Barrier Island. This is literally the only part of the city where there is a crowd.

Then it was some more walking for a yum cha lunch at Grand Harbour at the corner of Customs Street West and, Pakenham Street East, where we had barely taken off our coats when the roast pork cart came around (two please!).

There’s no time to feel guilty over a hundred dollars worth of dimsum; you just walk it off again until you come to the Britomart weekend market and see the stalls selling donuts. mochi-cheesecake hybrids and vegan pastries.

But then we didn’t really get dessert so….

How Was Your Friday? It was the usual

  1. He gets anxious when he forgets to bring his AirPods. He can’t pretend to be deep into Olivia Dean or Travis Scott or the old Weeknd or whatever he had on his music-streaming account, and now he has to pretend that without the music, he was deep in thought about something else. Surely, if you had no phone to look at or ear-thingies to listen to, what could you be doing looking at shit or thinking about shit? You were virtually exposed. Some loser could try to get your attention, to engage with you and then what? There were more and more people lately at the bus stop, phone-less, ear-thingyless, mouth slightly open, and eyes darting every which way like some animal that had been up all night. Were they hungry? Were they tired and needed to rest? He didn't really care. All he needed was to pretend to be deep into something while he watched them furtively.

  2. He could do anything he wanted. The tools of knowledge and creation stretched from creating a totally new face for someone, teaching an AI assistant to comb through gigabytes of archival data in less than 2 minutes, to rendering a brochure in 3D just because he could. Was it necessary? Not really, and in the end, he did an actual mock-up for the 3-fold cover just to see what it was like in real life.

  3. He wants to smell like he lived in a world on fire because it is.

  4. One of these days out of sheer childhood nostalgia, he’s going to sit down to a bowl of his childhood Fruit Loops and watch YouTube clips of Superfriends. He will remember the days when innocence meant trusting anything that felt and tasted good; sugary cereal, the tang of orange juice, rice slathered with pork fat and seasoned with fish sauce.

  5. Did you know? A McDonald's Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese (US) contains approximately 740–770 calories, 48–51g protein, 42–45g fat, and 40–43g carbs. This high-protein, high-fat burger also provides roughly 20g of saturated fat, 165mg cholesterol, and 1,360mg sodium.

Birthday Week food dump

It’s a birthday week now is it?

Happy Easter Sunday

  1. I remember being obsessed with penny loafers, but the bigger mystery was the source of that obsession. Where had I seen them? What thought process did I go through at 12, 13 (?) to make me want them? But the mystery deepens when I actually get the shoes (don’t know how I convinced my mother of that) and to wear them specifically for one event- the Stations of the Cross for Lent. They were so new that they cut the back of my heel. To this day I still can’t decide whether I suffered for fashion, or was punished by God for my vanity.

  2. I miss the quietude of the Holy Week of my childhood. No distraction of either entertainment or food. Pray and contemplate my mother, the lone Catholic enforcer in our household, urged us. I prayed- to get taller, for better (less oily) skin, for friends. I contemplated my existence, and of life out there in space, of faeries who attended Easter Sunday mass and whose only tell-tale clue of what they are is the absence of a medial cleft (I furtively scanned people’s faces as they bowed their heads and closed their eyes to pray).

  3. What do you eat for Sunday when everyone is dieting? Don’t forget the buns (we got a pistachio and chocolate variant); an easy to cook lamb (butterflied leg of lamb that cooks in 35 minutes); and sticky date pudding (minus the ice-cream). I miss the lechon from Bangsal which we got on the way back from church.

'Adult' books

In The Art of Simple, Eleanor Ozick retreats to the ‘bush’ country of Te Atatu and shows us that it’s okay to ‘isolate’ ourselves, that we can have our Walden moment. Well, in New Zealand we certainly can, and why not?

How can we stay connected to others without losing ourselves? Don’t ask me a question whose answer I already know. I could add my own tips: 1) don’t be afraid to let someone go if they turn out to be total cunts; 2) be generous; 3) know and respect the limit of your generosity.

What’s a reverse mortgage? What’s an offset account? Should you invest in unethical stocks, and to hell with ethics because the world is fucked anyway? Suddenly, moving out of middle-age and into the twilight (!) years is so much more than having great blood-work, great skin and getting away with wearing clothes meant for people two decades younger than you.

After being in this country for nearly 18 years, I’ve realised that I don’t really know much about it beyond my own Walden Pond. And that’s actually terrible.

If it feels like Monday, then it must be Monday

It’s actually Tuesday.

A brilliantly sunny, cold day, the chill coming in so suddenly- no warning, no transitional ease- that it makes you think of the worst. What if the weather turned the way our normally genial cat would suddenly turn from picture-perfect cuddliness to possessed, rabid psycho with razor-sharp claws?? (We’ve never clipped them, the better to defend herself, we’ve rationalised).

Well, I thought, glancing at the clothing racks filled with last season’s coats and jackets in the spare bedroom turned walk-in closet, at least we’re prepared. Last year was so strange that we didn’t do a spring clean at all. The coats and jackets have stayed put instead of being stored in the bins we have for winter clothing.

So which one is suitable for olive, wide-legged cargo pants and silver New Balance 1906s? The checked bomber in Italian wool? That waxed cotton jacket, perhaps in navy blue? Another bomber, but a shiny black aviator-style in flight nylon?

I could still smell last year’s scents on them- Replica’s By the Fireplace (my favourite, until I got three bottles at the same time as gifts and got sick of it); D.S & Durga’s Debaser, which I liked better than Diptyque’s Philosykos; Prada Pour Homme which smells like rain at 4am.

None of them seemed suitable and I wore a thermal hoodie instead.

Library Series (Botany)

Did you know what actually convinced to live in New Zealand permanently? It was the libraries.

I would spend every weekend at the library, making a whole day of it. A typical library Saturday would go like this: Gym, coffee, first book, meal break, 2nd book, walking break, 3rd book, espresso, last book of the day, walk home.

It gave me everything that I wanted and needed, beyond what a job or a relationship could ever give. I felt safe. I felt confident that I could find within it, the tools and knowledge I needed to solve any problem, hurdle any challenge. I felt validated, that being alone did not mean that you didn’t have anyone.

I felt entertained and mentally and intellectually satiated in a way that no amount of television (then) or social media (now) could ever fill.

And the last couple of months, I also discovered that in lieu of going out to eat, you could go to a library instead (well, we could always have good coffee after minus the pastry or the big brunch). But to make it more interesting, we’ve been going to different libraries; I would need to do an actual check, but this is our 12th library that we’ve visited in Auckland?

The Auckland Council Libraries is one of the best public library systems in the world; clean, efficient, housed in fit for purpose buildings, and actively involved within the communities they’re situated in.

When you have a society that cherishes and values food for the mind and soul without hidden agendas or censorship, then you know that society is doing things right.

China (town)

  1. Auckland doesn’t really have a Chinatown section per se; this was just a humungous aircraft-hangar sized mall-type structure with a food-court, a maze of shops, some restaurants, a supermarket and fish and meat shops. To complete the vibe, nobody really speaks English.

  2. ‘A horse, a horse! My kingdom for a horse!'. No, we weren’t desperate like King Richard III, we just loved how it looked and the fact that every time we asked for the prices of other stuff in his shop, the old Chinese guy kept lowering his price for the horse. When we were paying for it, our eyes were glued on the EFTPOS machine to make sure the amount didn’t have extra zeroes in it. Plus, it’s the year of the horse!

  3. Haggle, haggle, haggle! Or not.

  4. Looking for dumplings that have actual broth inside them? You can find them here.

  5. I wanted to buy some skate wings so bad, but I was intimidated by how big these were. I wish I photographed my hand with them for reference; a piece was bigger than an A4 sized paper.

Wild weather week

It had been raining on and off for weeks since Christmas and it honestly feels like June in the Philippines (my favourite month growing up because it’s back to school, love the smell of new notebooks and love the cold, grey, moody weather). It’s not the same as typhoons, and we’re happy with that!

Auckland has escaped the worst of it which is ironic given how many people seem to loathe living here.

Done

  1. Not being able to find an ideal place to walk, to jog (not fucking jogging on the highway).

  2. Eating three meals a day

  3. Waiting for the garbage to be picked up

  4. Listening to the drone of the television blasting cheerful programming the whole day

  5. Listening to the rooster crowing the whole day

  6. Being approached by people asking me for shit

Bye!

Things I'll Do If I Was Rich (1)

One day, all the rats as big as housecats had mysteriously disappeared. Turns out, a family of unrelated cats had started hanging out in the backyard. My sister-in-law’s mum, bless her heart, had taken to feeding one of them (Mr. Moustache) and he stuck around. Pretty soon, several more white, slinky-bodied strangers followed soon after. I’d met them all last June and this year, I got acquainted with a young ginger kitten who was too young to resist me picking her up. How she came to be with the adult cats I’ll never know.

In less than a week, she would come running at the sound of my voice (well, I always had food for her so..). Feeding her special tidbits, I’d make sure to fend off the other cats from trying to steal what she was eating. In less than a week, she’d gained a bit more weight and some sass to get some food for herself when they would all be fed from a single trough.

If I was rich, I would definitely bring her back with me to New Zealand. Though the process is quite straightforward, it would be quite expensive.

Little ginger would have to take her chances in Naguilayan. I pray to the spirits of nature to protect and nurture her until we meet again.