Fats, Vitamins and Minerals

After seeing a feature about adobo on television several days ago, I tried making the Kapampangan adobong dilaw. It turned out surprisingly good. It’s called “dilaw” because it uses atswete seeds instead of soysauce. Marinating the chicken in coconut vinegar with crushed garlic and sliced onions was a good idea, and cooking until the onions and the chicken caramelized together brought out a very exquisite sweet flavor However, I may have mader a mistake by putting onions into the marinade, and perhaps I shouldn’t have stirred the chicken too much while it was caramelizing, and perhaps shouldn’t have removed too much of the fat and oil that resulted from the process.

When to put laurel leaves in was not very clear to me. I did put it in after the caramelizing process, and don’t know if that was right. I also did not have any peppercorns which should go with laurel leaves. However, the flavor of the laurel was really a good addition, although some adobo purists would rather not put that in (as they would not put soysauce).

I like the idea of marinating in vinegar although in the old days without refrigerators and freezers it was really meant to keep and preserve food with taste as an effect of that. At home, we do use vinegar more for cleaning meats (which cornstarch can do as well).

Anyway, for the adobo, the vinegar marinade gave the chicken meat a tenderness and juiciness rather than a “vinegarry” sour taste as one would usually suspect.

Here is Edward, Maria with Alwin’s cat (which auntie says looks like a zebra).

Alwin and I made this cat from dental rubber mould (two clay-like parts that you mix and they start to set in about 15 minutes). Then we primed it with white and painted the black stripes (although Alwin says the cat has white stripes).

And here is my day’s work, a pair of earrings and two bracelets, made from beads, some new and some my mom or I have kept over 20 years ago.

I hope to make more today, to keep busy with something more or less creative.

The PNP siege in Iloilo the other day, the Commission on Human Rights said it looked like a godforsaken place. 2007, the country will become a “godforsaken place” again as we are sieged by the brutality of the national elections: police will be on high alert, kidnap for ransom cases will go up (allegedly to raise funds for political campaigns), the killings possibly linked directly to the coming elections have already started, the media saturated environment will reek with twice more propaganda.

There are excavations along the road right in front of our house, construction works for water and drainage. This huge bulldozer outside looks and sounds like an elephant, or more appropriately, a t-rex. My mother is very excited today because she has spoken to the construction people outside, so she is getting lots of soil from the roadworks. It is good soil and she will be using it for the garden.

Hopefully, the excavations will be cleaned up after the work. It is not uncommon that the public works people leave such things unattended for weeks, months or even years. After all, this is a godforsaken country. Anyway, we could plant fruits and vegetables in the excavations.

PS. Turns out the soil isn’t suitable for plants…

Death is what it truly feels like, this decision to “retire.” Not retirement from teaching (or employment), which I did earlier (2004), a “retirement” which gave me so much freedom and fulfilment, perhaps because the life that came after it was richer. This second phase of retirement is rather “retirement” from the work that I have known all my life - curating, organizing cultural programmes (I have just resigned as project director of Websining), developing and presenting my ideas to conferences and lectures (I have just “resigned” from the teleconference with Contre-Conference in Paris coming end of this month), and collaborating with other artists (I have just sent regrets to a two artist-run project called FemLink).

I suppose “giving up” entails great pains and depression, it seems that in the decision to engage in a relationship with someone (I am not even sure if I love this person) I was somewhat being beckoned to “give up” on the life that I have always known. But there is really no point in wallowing over the morbid details and the pains and losses of “death.” I need now to ask, what is life (if any) after death?

Will I still be happy?

At least, I assume that my ex-partner will be able to support me financially in my decision. I am still quite lucky as very poor people mourn deaths and have the added grief of mourning the cost of dying (funeral expenses mostly). They won’t even be able to get their dead out of the morgue without paying. At least I probably won’t be grieving that aspect of dying, although I am not so sure because my ex-partner claims to be “poor” and he is extremely stingy, a bt of a miser. My father was poor financially but he was never a miser or miserable man. So during the time our family was relatively poor, we were never miserable.

So, will I still be happy?

All my life the sole source of my life’s happiness has been my family. The decision to have a relationship under the most unconventional circumstances found most offensive yet still accepted by my family has surely affected my family relations. I suppose women who leave home and/or give up careers when they get married soon get pregnant and have a new life to look after, in other words, a new family and a new “career.” So after “death” there is indeed life. This is not quite possible with my ex-partner.

Will there be life after death?

I don’t know.

I have always found it unacceptable the religion and the tradition of wives submitting to their husbands, but now it seems that such is the law of the natural (human) world only made difficult in our modern and un-natural society.

Although I am not a fulltime “career woman”, I think I am beginning to feel more deeply the loneliness and necessity of either abandoning a “career” or silently pursuing it under the weight of a relationship with a man that a woman chooses to keep. “Necessity” because only a woman can sustainably nurture the survival of the human species (unless society sooner reaches the perfection of the artificial surrogate in addition to the professional); “loneliness” because the path to submission is bare: the matriarchal world has been demolished for the domains of patriarchal males and females.

Under the tradition of submission, women are marginalized because our society of men and women has changed; society has discarded the support systems by which that submission could be honored and nurtured. Men likewise are disenfranchised because they have lost their balance through a loss of their female principle, they are made to fit into the asymetrical mould of macho society, consequently unable to honor and thus pleasure their wives in mind, body and spirit.

My ex-partner complained that we never gave enough attention to our relationship because after I have finished a project, another one just suddenly comes up. I thought he was quite right, so I said yes, after the current project, I will stop and focus on us. Yet when discussing my current work, he gets excited and wants now to engage and do a workshop that touches on his interests in programming and art.

I will keep to my word (I wish I can drop my projects right now were it not for things such as contracts), although lonely but I will consider it an honor to myself as a woman, and just let the man muddle through his own internal imbalances. I have given him my permission.

Strange how being with my ex-partner drives me to emotional emptiness. I was happy for a while expressing and sharing my love for him, but an odd stagnation sets in after some time. His language of love is just so utterly lacking in sensuality.

This drives me to depression much faster than before. Now I feel like … I feel like I want to die. I feel like I am a total failure. I feel like I have just been abandoned. I feel like I am completely worthless. I feel like I have no self-respect for loving this person. I feel like all my intelligence has turned into a mental vacuum. I feel like a whore.

I wish I don’t need to wake up tomorrow. I wish this surreal world would just disappear. I wish I was someone else. I wish someone else more loving found me instead. I wish my father took me with him when he died. I wish I was dead.

So is this love? How can this be love?

As a kid, I would go around shouting “walang magawa!” throughout the summer, when school is out. Having nothing to do drove me to a tantrum. I would never forget what my father told me, “puros ka ganyan, kapag mag-asawa ka, ang bilis mong magsasawa!”

I wonder if his observation was true. Certainly I bore very easily, I get tired of things very easily and I want results very quickly. Talk about patience. The more I understand now why it is a virtue.

Maybe this is why I work so quickly, so passionately, once I have found that which I find exciting to do. And those that bore me can be easily left unattended, including those that used to be exciting. Why?

Perhaps I don’t have much time, in this life, perhaps time comes in very limited supply. Especially now that I am older - I may not be shouting “walang magawa!” but I feel tired, rather bored of all the things that life has brought me.

So maybe this is why I try to find new pleasures in old things, and try to find excitement in simple things, and try to keep believing in promises and in change. But even trying is getting to be exhausting now. And once tired, rest and then move on, move on to other things…