Four Seasons

Fried food is part and parcel of an Asian cuisine. Red or white meat, fish - finding a dish that is oil-fried on the table is no surprise by any means. In my country, lard, a type of oil coming from pork, is vehemently adored. Oh boy, the moment our neighbor starts frying dried salted fish deep in lard, I wonder if he's going to wake up the dead. Dried salted fish, or bulad (boo-lad), even in its raw state, smells terribly unspeakable. What more if you fry and combine it with the reek of burning lard! For foreign nostrils, it sure is out of this world. While it spells heaven for almost all Filipinos, it is extreme hell for those not immune to the aroma. Never a rose without the prick, indeed. A single frying event, when I was living in the Netherlands, had gotten me into thinking of the possibilities of being killed by flatmates for no other reason but dried salted fish. In a flat with nine others - six Dutch, two lady Russians and one Pakistani - stupid me, I should have known t...

Do your friends take your childhood disappointments and misadventures seriously? As for mine, sadly, never mind. In a conversation I had with close friends yesterday, never have they been sorry about my stories spiced up with sour remembrances of days past. Am I inadequate with attention? Fine if they laughed. It was worse when those moments I wanted them to hear didn't seem to have significance of sorts. Not meaningful enough. Maybe, it's funny for me to be forlorn over spilt milk. Come on. Is there really no sense in looking back and basking in the afterthought that I can still dignify, by dint of memory, even the foregone moments I once detested but now merrily summon. Like when … … I graduated a notch lower from the honor roll after my lady adviser in sixth grade favored a classmate less deserving but much better-looking than I was (she never missed admiring his white-as-a-sheet shirt during classes). ... I became the talk of the school campus after my classmates lear...