Let’s Make Yogurt!

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(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

Words from an Asshole

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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.

Bloggerbels is Mobile-Friendly for 2016!

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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?

No More Drinkin’

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It’s been more than five months since my last drink, and I feel good!

I hate to disappoint you, but my last sip of alcohol was not part of a nightmarish bender. It was, in fact, quite prosaic: a bottle of San Miguel, perhaps preceded by one other bottle at most, consumed on Malapascua Island in Cebu – a pretty good place for drinking, as far as that goes. Nothing interesting happened, good or bad, as a consequence of my consumption of that solitary beer. If anything, the sheer blandness of that experience is probably what finally inspired me to stop drinking.

My drinking habit is something that formed gradually and imperceptibly. For years I wasn’t terribly interested in alcohol, partly due to my parents’ brilliant efforts to deglamourize it by offering me and my brother little sips of wine over family dinners at home, starting at quite a young age. It worked quite well, I think, until I moved 11,000 kilometres from home, and negative habits gradually began to take root.

Once I was on my own, I began to sporadically experiment with more excessive forms of drinking. Manila’s infinite quantities of nightlife, along with the overall Filipino fondness for drinking, provide ample opportunities to drink to the point of regret. But although I’ve been plenty drunk plenty of times since, it didn’t take me long to realize the limited appeal of heavy drinking. Inhibitions have long since ceased to be a major problem for me – if anything, the problem is that I tend to be too much myself – so being drunk never offered many advantages other than making boring people seem like more interesting company. On the other hand, the disadvantage of feeling absolutely terrible afterward was pretty hard to miss. Even the social advantages tended to be rather one-sided, given the fact that I am, based on my experience, quite socially objectionable when I’ve had a few too many. And the alienation I experienced caused me to get frustrated and behave more badly, leading to some experiences too awful to describe in any sort of detail. As the sad, lonely, regrettable experiences with drunkenness began to pile up, the disadvantages of heavy drinking became quite hard to miss. And although I’ve still had to re-learn that lesson from time to time, with all the subsequent occasions I’ve hoped against all odds that heavy drinking would help me cut loose, give me a night to remember, etc., it almost always led only to more reminders of why limiting myself to a couple of beers was a very good idea. Read More

Doing The Best We Can

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When I was a teenager, I ended up in a heated debate with an older friend of a friend. This man, who must’ve been more than twice my age at the time, looked a bit like Jim Carrey and had a great deal of earnestness about him. As we sat with our larger group at a local diner, we became embroiled in an argument about whether we could really expect people to make a greater effort in their daily lives. According to him, people who were slovenly, thoughtless, or just plain lazy in their daily dealings couldn’t be faulted because they were inevitably doing the best they can. I, as an angry teenage firebrand, adamantly insisted that we could hold people to task for their failings and shortcomings, because they always had the capacity to do better.

The debate was long, interminable, and never satisfyingly concluded. Somehow, life managed to go on in spite of the this, and we continued along on our respective journeys.

Lately, though, my mind has been returning to that debate. I think about how my life has changed since then, and with it, my attitudes. When I was a troublemaking teenager, swept up in a sea of hormones and uncontrolled emotions, and picking fights with the cosmos, I was paradoxically quite convinced of my absolute mastery of myself – this in spite of the fact that I didn’t know a damn thing about anything, least of all myself. But now that I’ve quieted most of my inner struggles and molded my life into more or less what I wanted it to be, things feel a bit grey and monotonous, like there is nothing left for me to push my will against. And now, I feel like I’m doing the best I can, too. Adulthood feels like something that we shuffle our way through, trying not to trip on the speed bumps, and just doing the best we can. Read More

A Very Dengue Christmas

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Source: http://mosquitojoe.com/author/admin/page/2/
Source: http://mosquitojoe.com/author/admin/page/2/
Thanks, Mosquito Joe!

As someone from a fairly sedate country with fairly sedate diseases, I have long felt that the tropics have a near-monopoly on the nastiest, most horrifying infections, including the ones that lay eggs in your brain.

That said, during my nine years in this part of the world I’ve managed to only be afflicted with fairly prosaic infections: a good number of bacteria have crawled their way inside my respiratory tract; I’ve had to receive enough rabies and tetantus shots to inoculate an accident-prone elephant; and perhaps I’ve had a horrifying mini-stroke or two, give or take. But as far as I know, nothing has ever laid its eggs inside my brain.

However, last week I received a bit of a crash course in tropical diseases. It started off innocently enough: at my work Christmas party on December 21, while entertaining my colleagues with my karaoke renditions of The Little Drummer Boy, The Christmas Waltz and other seasonal classics, I started feeling a bit weak. By the time I made it home a few hours later, I felt certifiably gross, and wasquite feverish. I slept until late the next morning, thinking it was one of those quick-to-come, quick-to-go flu infections – the kind where the primary symptom, extreme tiredness, leads elegant into the best treatment, bed rest. After about twelve hours in bed I did feel better, but later that day the fever attacked me with renewed vengeance. Read More

Ding Dong and the Importance of Forgiveness

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As many of my friends know (and are quite tired of hearing), I am honestly not the biggest fan of food in Manila. To get a really good meal here requires either a lot of determination or a lot of money – and given the minuscule portion sizes relative to my chubby 6 foot frame, a small appetite doesn’t hurt, either.

However, I do love a lot of Filipino food. The Philippines boasts some delicious regional cuisines, such as Bicol’s red hot specialties, or the turmeric-mad (and equally chilli-saturated) food of the Maranao. Perhaps best of all is the irresistible freshness of Cebuano dishes, with their mouth-watering lemongrass-scented soups, incredible kinilaw (basically a Filipino version of ceviche), and delectably tender barbeque – all of which have spread through the southern Philippines and, in some cases, have even been improved upon in places like Davao City. But one thing that Manila is good for is snack foods. There are plenty of salty, sweet, guiltily delicious ways to fill in a spare corner of my stomach, even if actually filling it to capacity tends to be a challenge given my monstrous appetite. Stop by the local Family Mart, 7/11, or, if you have no choice, Mini-Stop, and take in the vast cornucopia of addictively unhealthy munchables!

And it’s a great time to be a lover of snack foods in the Philippines. Even a few years ago I felt like I had to rely on expensive imported US brands to really satisfy my MSG cravings, but the country appears to be undergoing a snack food renaissance. Local snack food manufacturers are really bringing their A-game with new offerings like Oishi’s Gourmet Picks (in the absolutely divine wasabi flavour and its somewhat less impressive counterparts), or Leslie’s new Farmer John chips – the salt and vinegar flavour is pretty close to heaven, and ensures that I’ll never have to waste my money on Lay’s again. I know this sounds like a press release, but I really do love a good potato chip – all respect due to the food chemists who engineered these modern-day marvels!

One of the less glamourous old-school entries in the Philippine snack food lineup is Ding Dong. Basically, it’s an assortment of dried crunchy things that is, for some reason, being marketed as “mixed nuts” (more on that later).

Source: https://crispsofthecaribbean.wordpress.com/ding-dong-mixed-nuts/
Source: https://crispsofthecaribbean.wordpress.com/ding-dong-mixed-nuts/

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Reflections on Drowning My First Rat

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After two very busy months during which I simply couldn’t find the time to blog, I have been pulled back into the blogging world by some exciting news: I just drowned my first rat!

You’ll have to forgive my gallows humour, as my mind is, in fact, heavily burdened with the great significance of what I have done. For the first time ever, I have intentionally killed an animal that I could imagine having a mind – that is, something that exists as a separate entity beyond a series of instinctual reactions to nervous stimuli. I have just drowned, with ruthless efficiency, something that is much closer to my beloved dogs than it is to bacteria, plankton or protozoa. And not only that, but I have already murdered four of them, perhaps with plenty more to come.

As you can imagine (if you don’t already know), Metro Manila is positively overrun with rats and roaches. The roaches create no ethical quagmire for me – they are as vile as they are stupid, even if nature has endowed them with a remarkable set of skills for invading human living space and exploiting it in the most disgusting ways possible. I have murdered hundreds of roaches in every way imaginable: squashing, spraying, and – the least messy and most satisfying option for those encountered in the bathroom – incapacitating them by spraying them with the bidet hose, picking them up by one antenna with a piece of tissue, and then flushing them down the toilet. Out of sight, out of mind!

Unfortunately, the rats create a more prickly conundrum for the animal-loving ethicist. For years I never had to deal with this veritable Sophie’s choice because I lived in condos, and apparently rats are far less intrepid than roaches when it comes to climbing up to the 34th floor. But since I transitioned to suburban bliss in Muntinlupa City, I’ve had to deal with all the pitfalls of having your own house and yard: leaky roofs, constant fear of burglary, nosy neighbours, and yes, rats. Read More

Buffet 101 and the Modern-Day Vomitorium

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Tonight I had an experience that is quite rare for me: I ate at a high-end buffet. Given my notorious stinginess and my staunch “I don’t eat out in Manila unless it’s canteens, pizza or fast food” policy (which will get its own post, of course!), it takes some truly unusual circumstances to drag me out to the high-end smorgasborgs which have sprouted up throughout the Metro.

As it happens, this high-end buffet served as a most unusual location for a first date with a local woman off an Internet dating site. (What can I say? I’m trying to get out more.) For some reason, she decided that such an ostentatious choice would be ideal for the first meetup between two total strangers; with my usual suaveness, I informed her that I would only eat at such a ritzy establishment if it were birthday or if someone were treating me. Although I expected her to simply lose interest and find another dining companion who wasn’t a stingy jerk (or who was currently celebrating his birthday), she surprised me by insisting that she’d pay for both of us. After a few incredulous rounds of “Do you really want to pay for me?” and several affirmative responses, I finally accepted. I was pretty baffled, but since it’s not every day that strangers offer me expensive meals, it was hard to say no. So, after meeting up with her in Makati and wandering around the malls for a few hours, abusing the free karaoke machine demos in music stores and searching for a pepper mill – more of the makings of a great first date – we ended up at Buffet 101, which touts itself as the longest buffet line in the Philippines. (Incidentally, I did manage to find an inexpensive pepper mill, and I expect my nose to be very happy during the coming weeks and months.)

Buffet 101 is one of several highish-end buffets that can now be found in Manila and other major cities, along with such competitors as Dad’s, Yaki Mix and Vikings. A meal at one of these restaurants could run you between 500 and 1200 pesos ($11 to $25 US), which sounds like a pretty wide price range, but all are equally unaffordable for your average indigent rice farmer or sidewalk cigarette-and-mint vendor. These massive food-based amusement parks have popped up all over Manila, Cebu and Davao as the aspirational middle class continue to seek out new ways to celebrate the sweet life. Or, to put it another way, they provide a helpful answer to the nagging question: “Now that I have all this money, what can I spend it on so as to avoid giving it to the poor?” Read More

I Will Name All of My Sons and Daughters “Skyway”

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In Metro Manila, there are two inevitabilities: not death and taxes, as taxes are all too frequently evaded here, but death and traffic. However, that is not to say that the soul-crushing weight of traffic is evenly distributed throughout the Metro: the road network that links together the 17 cities and municipalities of Metro Manila ranges from potholed one-way side roads plied by bicycle rickshaws to monstrous twelve-lane expressways choked with trucks, buses and shiny new SUVs, and traffic conditions can vary wildly from road to road, hour to hour, and day to day. Some general traffic trends can be discerned, as when millions of commuters travel each morning from their homes in the suburbs (mostly in the north) to the business districts of the centre, then pour back into their suburban enclaves in the evenings. Each week also brings, with grim predictability, the great and terrible Friday night exodus from the Metro, an apocalyptic spectacle wherein millions of Monday-to-Friday Manileños leave their offices and boarding houses to slowly honk their way back to the relative peace and quiet of their home provinces. But amidst all of these recurring patterns, one of the most remarkable features of Manila traffic is its sheer unpredictability. Of course, many of Manila’s impromptu traffic jams are caused by obvious factors like rain, road accidents, and naked, mentally ill men walking down the middle of busy freeways. On the other hand, other traffic flare-ups seem almost inexplicable, like the impassible midnight traffic jams I’ve found myself in at Pasay Rotonda, or total gridlock in a sleepy residential area of New Manila on a Saturday afternoon.

Given the massive socioeconomic disparities that are pervasive in Manila, it’s no surprise that one’s experience of Manila traffic can vary wildly depending on one’s level of privilege. It seems a bit silly that many people would apply the word “commuting” to both an underpaid service worker inhaling hot, toxic air while trapped inside a crowded jeepney for two interminable hours of stop-and-go honking, and to an executive being shuttled to their office by their driver inside an air-conditioned SUV equipped with pitch-black tinted windows to protect them from the unworthy eyes of the masses while they catch up on business e-mails and watch funny YouTube videos on their iPad. But still, although money may buy comfort, it cannot buy you freedom from the time-sucking daily reality of Manila traffic. The three MRT and LRT lines offer commuters a chance to soar above the gridlock, but at the price of sacrificing any basic notion of personal space, and with constant risk of getting groped or pickpocketed. The only people who can really beat the system are the lucky few with access to private helicopters – and even then, they’re still constrained by only being able to travel to locations that are equipped with helipads, which feels like an indignity all its own. Read More