Memories

 

FOR those of us who are of a certain age, not that I want to tell you how to handle your life and family, but maybe you should consider taking the chance of imparting some of your experiences on the youngsters.

I had a weird day, and decided to have a couple of drinks and put on my MOST AWESOME DISCO PLAYLIST EVER to unwind while I made dinner, ahead of my 20-year-old daughter/roommate returning from classes.

(by the way, if anyone is interested, the playlist can be found at: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2aR4jfU4krN2P4FYeXLl9M?si=-w9BMie3SrWJmuHRf8TXUQ&pi=2Z8i7fwxSaK8e) 

Ilona had an unusual and to be honest, rather ego-salving story to relate. She has a biochemistry professor, a soft-spoken, Bob Ross kind of guy, but one who occasionally drops a tidbit of personal history that indicates that this guy has seen some shit. He was an army nurse “in the war.” What army, and what war, no one knows. Today, he casually related to his class how one deals with radiation victims, without providing further context, other than saying it in such a way, according to my daughter, that made it clear he was speaking from first-hand experience.

What?! I have to meet this guy.

Anyway, the part of her report from today’s biochem class session that caught my attention was her interaction with this teacher when she handed in her quiz for the day (20 minutes ahead of all her classmates, because she’s really good at this). She said he gave her a curious look and then asked her, “are you Hungarian, or maybe Romanian?”

We are, in fact, of mostly Hungarian descent. Well, I am; she is half that and half Moro Filipino, but it’s my genes that won, and she could – as I have – land in Budapest and be assumed to be a native. She looks like my sister, actually. It is highly unusual for someone to guess our ethnicity, in any part of the world (outside Eastern Europe), and especially here in Asia. It’s only happened to me twice; once when I first met a Romanian expat of Hungarian extraction (he’s a good guy, I should look him up, come to think of it), and once when I met a Hungarian nun at a festival put on by the EU Mission and addressed her as nővér.

That started a conversation about heritage and family history, which segued into the always fascinating topic of “Dad When He Was Young and not Decrepit.” I caught her grooving along to the disco music, which was not a normal reaction, as she usually rolls her eyes so hard you can hear them and puts on her headphones when she walks in on my filling the house with my music, as young people should.

So, I committed the ordinarily unforgivable sin and asked her, “Do you like this music?”

She stopped and gave me a thoughtful look, “It’s not my speed, I gotta be honest. But...it makes me feel connected, somehow. I’m thinking about my professor today, and I feel like maybe...I don’t know what you call it, but maybe there’s a thread of history I’m connected to – our culture, and especially you. You listen to different music, usually, but you act different when you’re playing this disco stuff. Why?”

I grew up, came of age so to speak, across the latter half of the 70s and the first half of the 80s, and while my own musical tastes morphed from disco to new wave to punk across those years, it was the disco that imprinted on me. Not just the music, but the entire vibe of the world at that time. If there was one moment in history that I would say made me what I am now more than any other, I would say the summer of 1978 – the Summer of Sam. And god bless Spike Lee, I will always be a fan, because he nailed that shit.

For all its flaws and awfulness, the world when we were young still had some promise. I’m not sure it does anymore. So talk to your kids. Tell them how it was, and how you felt. What it was like to take five hits of mescaline and see lizards coming out of the walls. Or playing “midnight drive” with Brother Tom on the front lawn of the frat house in the dead of night, and counting the seconds until the golf ball  launched into the dark made the sound of hitting something a few blocks away, and trying to guess what that was. Or living under the perceived constant threat of nuclear annihilation. Or the AIDS epidemic. Or acid rain. Or making friends with Vietnamese and Cambodian refugee kids who suddenly appeared in school. For as scary as the world could be, there was always a sense that we were tougher and smarter than whatever it could throw at us, and that if we kept our hearts in the right place and did our best, we would eventually come out okay.

I don’t know if the world is like that anymore, and it saddens me more than I can describe. But the way of the world is up to us, so maybe if those of us whose better days are far behind share how we got to our ripe old age but still full of piss and vinegar, maybe the generations whose turn it is to run the world will find it in themselves to actually do it.

Back to the Scene

OBVIOUSLY, it has been a while since I have posted here. But the long hiatus has been worthwhile, because I had some things to work out. Not that I actually worked any of them out, mind you; my life and work is as chaotic and on-edge as it ever was, it’s just that I understand it better now.

Jesus, that sounds so pretentious. Nevertheless, it is a reasonably accurate assessment.

In real-time terms, some of the major developments here at the Bad Manners Gun Club over the past couple of months include adding a part-time job as a communications consultant for a small energy firm to my already overloaded work portfolio; seeing my daughter off to her first year of nursing school; starting my novel in earnest; and reconnecting with my mother after a long – too long – period of being out of touch. There has also been a change in management at The Manila Times; while this has worked out perfectly well – not necessarily better than before, but by no means worse – and has not been disruptive for me at all, it still has required a bit of energy to get to know the new boss (younger sister of the old one, in this case), and adjust one’s approach to interactions accordingly. I’m still employed, so I guess I’m doing it right.

As for everything else, I have to say I’m fairly pleased with how things are going. The extra side job is a bit frustrating, but it is the sort of business that I think is important to the country’s and the world’s future, and I would like to see it succeed, so I will say “challenging” instead.

Protip: If you have a Western mindset and are dealing with ethnic Chinese businesspeople (these folks are mostly from Malaysia), do not assume they follow the same rules of engagement you’re accustomed to. I knew this going in, of course; I’ve been in Asia a long time, and I was first exposed to the inscrutable nature (and poor English proficiency) of the Chinese mind decades ago during a stint in San Francisco, but that doesn’t make things any easier.

After years of thinking about the story in my head, and more false starts than I can remember, the novel is finally well and truly underway. I’m actually working on the fourth version of it; I started it and got a considerable way into the work (as in, as far as 5 or 6 chapters) three times before I narrowed it down to the approach that works.

It’s still shit, of course; it is, after all, a first draft, when the objective is just to get words on paper. But all of this work has happened in the span of about 3-4 months, which gives me the confidence that this damned thing will actually happen.

My daughter is doing a fantastic job with her studies, at this early stage. She obviously loves the subject matter, and has insanely high personal standards for herself, which has been reflected in her topping the entire class in every one of the early exams so far. She got herself elected as class president as well, and has revealed herself to be a dictatorial hardass, as far as that goes. It would worry me, except that all available evidence is that her shrinking-violet classmates adore her for it.

I have always been proud of my kids. But watching her come into her own, finding her personal passion, and seizing her environment by the throat and bending it to her will makes my heart soar.

Mom’s doing well. I should message her so that we can chop it up about the start of the NFL season, but I just realized it’s about 3 in the morning where she is, so I probably ought to wait until later.

I realize that all of this personal reflection, as it were, may seem a bit strange, but I do have an objective in sharing it. The other night, walking around the neighborhood after a good dinner and a couple of drinks and lost in my thoughts, I considered how whatever is happening in my life personally is happening against a backdrop of world that is going completely off the rails. The insane situation in the US is obviously a harbinger of doom, but it’s not just that; the war in Ukraine, the Israeli genocide being carried out against Gaza, the machinations of the Xi regime in China, and more immediately, the descent of Indonesia into chaos and an incredibly far-reaching corruption scandal that has erupted here in the Philippines, with the rapidly deteriorating state of environment lying like a soaking-wet blanket infested with smallpox over all of it.  

And what is one to make of it all?

From my perspective, one cannot decide how to engage with the rest of the world without grounding oneself: Whether you decide to pull the blankets over your head and hide from the horrors of the world, or decide to pick a battle, or decide to take it all on, you’re not going to be successful at all if you can’t ground yourself to something. You don’t need to know all the answers, and in fact, you probably never will; but you will never even be able to ask the questions and act on them unless you know who you are, where you’re coming from, and what’s important to you – or at least have a reasonably good idea about all of that. Give yourself time to do that. And at the end of that time, no matter how you decide to face the world, the world will be a better place for your doing what’s right for you.