Anak: The TRAIN Law Edition

I found this video which dubbed the film Anak's confrontation scene between Vilma Santos and Claudine Barreto into Ilonggo. Instead of the high octane argument over a mother's lack of time for her children because she chose to work abroad to give her children a good life, this parody took the very real consequences of the TRAIN law on regular Filipinos. 

The daughter now complains that their meal now consists of eggplant day in, day out. The mother claims that she does cook meat--once a year, the daughter counters. Once a month, the mother says. And even then the little amount of meat is swimming in about 3 liters of water. It's all pretty funny if it weren't also a painful reminder that a lot of people probably will have (or already had) arguments with their own families about how they can no longer afford certain things even if they arguably have more take home pay now. 

I don't speak Ilonggo, but it's easy to get the context and drift of the scene's dialogue. Almost sure that this would be funnier if I could understand every word. All in all a really good subversion of how the government messes up our lives. Props to the owner of the video, Val TV on Facebook. 

Baon Blues

Hipster baon: Noodles in a jar! 

One of my bigger expense categories is food, especially food eaten while at work. Usually, wherever there are students, there would be cheap food. Sure, this would be loaded with carbs and fats, but would assure you of energy throughout the day. (Bacsilog with melted cheese topping, anyone?) However, just a few tries of these cheap meals convinced me that (1) my body is not young enough to process all that bad juju and (2) the calories will keep you young, as in deds agad. So, no. 

Now where I work, it’s always cheap eats. There are restaurants all around, but if you eat in one everyday, and most of the time, it’s not just lunch, sometimes dinner, usually merienda, and coffee,definitely. The go-to eating place has a stall that sells “healthy” food, and it would cost you Php165. So, no. 

There is an employee canteen, but usually the food there runs out or spoken for by 11AM. If your schedule doesn’t allow you to drop by and “save” your Ulam for lunch, good luck to you. You run to the other canteen where vegetables + rice will run you maybe Php55-70, and a meat viand + rice is Php90-115. Also not viable. 

The tipid alternative would be to bring your own lunch. The trouble is if your workday starts at 7:30AM, which means you have to be up and going by 5:30AM, and if it ends also at 7:30PM, which means you get home past 9AM. By then, you have almost no energy to cook, and you’ll be so tempted to just eat out before you crash on your bed at home. 

During this weird 12 hour working period, I almost always ended up eating out at least twice a day. When I tallied it, I was spending nearly 8k/month on food. If you’re single, that’s a big amount and all it takes is having regularly having sub-200 lunches and brewed coffee. 

It takes control to prepare your meals, but something necessary if you want to not spend all your paycheck on carbs and coffee. I don’t always succeed on this, but I do try most of the time—heck, even once a week—to bring food with me. I’ve also learned to check out the nearby grocery and sometimes stock on instant coffee (just coffee, not 3-in-1 because the sugar in those are deadly) and crackers and sometimes fruit and oatmeal for quick in between meals. 

Japanese lunches cost money. 

Sometimes, like when people at the office are excited to see actual people (we don’t always have the same work/lunch schedule), we do eat out. Usually this would be around the start of the term, or somewhere near the end just before finals. One time, we just went for coffee and pastries, and it cost me Php280. Or dinner from the Japanese takeout—Php350. Sometimes I don’t mind it especially if it’s just an occasional thing. It’s celebratory and builds camaraderie, so I’m down for that. But if you do it regularly, I don’t know if I’ll have anything else left over. So basically, everything in moderation. 

There's only a month or so left in the work cycle, and when the homestretch comes, sometimes you don't have the energy to meal prep anymore. But I resolve to do more meal preps in future workdays. So do wish me luck. 

The Ghetto Guide to Growing Your Own Food

From Ari LeVaux's Slate column

I was working at home yesterday, and sometime in the afternoon, I grew hungry. Didn't have much time to cook, so it had to be a low effort, what's-in-the-fridge endeavor. We had tomatoes, I had bagoong. I started washing the tomatoes when I spied the patch of alugbati creeping up the side wall. 

I'm not sure who planted it anymore: usually, when we buy vegetables, like bunches of camote or alugbati, those branches get sticked into the soil outside the house. It's something that we grew up with when we still had a huge yard with several trees. When I was a kid, there was a summer that we had the backyard overrun with camote. My brother and I would pick the leaves and put them on the rice and have them as snacks, which annoyed our mother as come dinner time, we wouldn't have appetites for a proper meal anymore. So you could be sure that at any given moment, there would be something edible growing in the yard, diminished size or not. Cut vegetables stalks turn into more vegies. Egg shells become fertilizer. But I suppose I've inherited a more practical approach to growing things. 

When people talk about gardening, it's usually this big effort--not to mention the expense that comes with cultivating plants. The idea of growing one's food is something that can be done to help out with the food expense. People are concerned with "local" and "organic" and "carbon footprints," but for the life of me, I cannot bring myself to pay a hundred bucks for a small tin of cherry tomatoes. It's just not practical. 

It even becomes more complicated when you talk about city or urban gardening. There isn't enough space, specially if one lived in an apartment or a cramped condo unit.

I was glad to run into this "lazy gardener's high yield technique," and it's simply this: throw seeds in the garden. It's so low effort, and yet you get good returns. I have been planning to start a more "proper" garden, but like Ari LeVaugh, it takes me a while to get things done. So I like this approach. It's so similar to our stick it in and watch it grow approach that I'm sure it would work. 

So yesterday, I saw the alugbati and picked off the leaves, blanched them, and ate them along with my tomato and bagoong salad.  I count myself lucky for that small patch of earth we can stick things in. Now if only I can get myself to be a little less lazy and clear the yard so there would be more room to scatter seeds in. 

Writing Pop Hits

The name Bonnie McKee might not ring a bell, but these songs will have you humming: "California Gurls," "Last Friday Night" and "Teenage Dream" for Katy Perry and "Hold It Against Me" for Britney Spears. 

She might not be the voice for the songs, but the songs wouldn't exist if she had not written them for some of pop's current leading ladies. It doesn't quite surprise me that McKee wanted to be a pop star herself--her 2004 debut album tanked. As she says in this Hollywood Reporter interview, "My experience in the industry was that you put all this heart and soul into shit and then it never happens." But as they say, lemons to lemonade. She knew music, she could write, and write she did. 

Her turning point was "California Gurls," which I vaguely remember was said to be written as a response to Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind." Katy Perry wanted a West Coast equivalent that was fun and bubbly--and probably something to prove that "I Kissed A Girl" wasn't just a fluke. McKee describes the semi-unreal feeling of hearing the song you wrote on the radio: 

"Well, maybe this will work; maybe it won’t." And then when it came on the radio I was, like, "Wow I did that a couple months ago and I can’t believe it’s actually on the radio and it actually worked!" When that started playing a lot I was just in shock. I couldn’t believe it … I think ‘California Gurls’ is the first one that really showed me that.

It really surprised me that she wrote some of Katy Perry's biggest hits. I had been under the impression that Katy Perry wrote most of her songs. But "Teenage Dream?" Man, that is major:

That’s a title I’d had bouncing around in my head for years that I had been holding onto for myself … So that was tough one to give up. There’s a lot of little Bonnie-isms in "Teenage Dream" that I was hoping to keep for myself. But at that moment I didn’t have hot water, I didn’t have a cell phone, I didn’t have a car. So it was now or never. I’m glad that I did it. 

McKee says "Teenage Dream" is the song she is most proud of having written. And I have to agree. It's the right mix of vulnerability and braveness and oh, youth! That she was hoping to sing it herself, but there were bills to pay. She wouldn't have written it if she weren't poor and desperate. Literally, this is a money for food moment. All we hear is Katy Perry's name and voice and pop sugar outfits, but where would she be if it weren't for the songs, yeah?

I'm also glad that she has not completely given up on her own pop dreams. She is working on her next album. My bet is that she got tons of goodwill from the work she did for others, and now she has another shot at it. She describes her work as something like "what Blondie would sound like in 2013." I would be looking forward to that.