Signs you have been Living in NYC too long

I just got this in my e-mail and I'm not quite sure yet if I should agree on everything said here. I haven't really been in New York for long anyway. But, I just thought that it's blog-worthy, so here it is!

Signs you have been Living in NYC too long:

1. You get very annoyed with out-of-towners who think the subway is unsafe.

2. You actively avoid bars that people from the outer boroughs frequent.

3. You figure that a date costs at least $200.

4. You have not seen a bank teller in several years, because your idea of going to the bank is using the ATM at your corner deli.

5. You haven't smelled grass clippings in over a year.

6. You haven't "called shotgun" in a long, long time.

7. You think that New Jersey seems really far away.

8. You plot the Barney's Warehouse Sale on your calendar.

9. You have over two month's rent in credit card debt, but you still eat out every night.

10. Your give out your cell phone number to people you meet, because that is the only way to reach you.

11. You have stayed out later than 4 am on a Monday or a Tuesday night.

12. Your passport gets more use than your driver's license.

13. You are ashamed to be assigned a 646 area code.

14. You can't imagine eating dinner before 8 o'clock at night.

15. Not one of your adult friends is married, has a car, owns an apartment, or aspires to any of the above.

16. You think nothing of a man in leather pants.

17. Your childhood bedroom is bigger than your current apartment, but your rent costs more than your parents' mortgage payment.

18. At least one meal each week consists solely of drinks, olives, and nuts.

19. You eat Thai, Vietnamese, Indian and sushi at least once each week.

20. You tell everyone you love NY because you of the cultural institutions, but can't remember the last time you set foot in a museum.

21. You spend $10 to see a movie.

22. You take $150 with you every night you go out: $20 for cabs, $20 for cover, $60 for dinner, and $50 for drinks.

23. You have gone out on 3 dates with 3 different people in the same week, but haven't spoken to any of them since.

24. You wear Prada shoes, Gucci sunglasses, a Cartier watch, and cashmere, but claim to be poor.

25. You think the only places you could ever live are New York, Paris, London, San Francisco or on an island in the Caribbean.

Of Chinese and Fortunes

When a Manileňa is hungry, she dials Jollibee. When a New Yorker is hungry, she calls the nearest Chinese. Nothing beats Chickenjoy (still), but General Tso’s exquisite (and cheap) creation is a strong no. 2!

Chinese restaurants are a poor-student-living-in-Manhattan's solution/savior to getting cheap, warm, filling and fast rice meals. It's most accessible and the closest a NY meal can get to home-cooked Filipino food = rice + ulam. It's just like Starbucks, there's one in every corner!

A New Yorker is lucky if her apartment is located nearby good ones in the likes of Jimmy Sung’s or 69 Chinese Food. But, there are other well-kept secrets in every corner of Manhattan. Like in Midtown, for example. Around my apartment location is Mee Noodle Shop, Hop Won Noodle, Shi Lee and Sichuan Palace.

Reading Chinese menus amuses me! They make me smile during a very low morning.

“We have five kinds of noodle” or "Spicy Scallops with hot pepper sauce and peanut"

(That still cracks me up)

It wouldn’t really matter at the end of the day, because the five kinds of noodle they have are their best-sellers – and they are tasty, nonetheless.

What I like about ordering Chinese, apart from the menu hilarity and getting my chock-full of MSG, is getting little fortune cookies! (I’m a sucker for astrology, fortune-telling, palm reading, and other time-and-money-wasted foretelling.)

I know, I know. Life is what I make it. But it doesn’t really hurt reading and picking on how hilarious and ridiculous my future can be. (See Justification here: there is a huge gap between reading and believing. I do this for fun.)

I’ve ordered more than a dozen Chinese in my last 2 months here in New York, and too bad, I wasn’t able to keep all the little fortunes that my little cookies foretold of me. But I’ll enlist some weird and interesting ones here:

1.Always accept yourself the way you are.
2.There is gradual improvement. Feelings are sweet and tender.
3. You have a potential urge and ability for accomplishment.
4. A heavy burden is lifted with a phone message or letter.
5. A modest man never talks to himself.
6. Think of mother’s exhortations more.
7. All the effort you are making will ultimately pay off.

And my most favorite:

8. You are who you are. (Haha!)

Pink Rose

The pink rose

Gay as gay can get

I love gay men. I love my gay friends. They can be a girlfriend and boyfriend fused into one. One day, they will share painful tears of a female heart, and another day, they will act as if they have manly bravado and sensual appetite.

I embarked on my very first gay environment experience with my good friend, Alvin. Turns out gay people are normal as normal can be. They dream, they fear, they fall in love and they get their hearts broken. They are not from another planet as others might typcast - sometimes they are even more in touch with the world than men with testosterone-overflow.

Alvin began our Saturday evening by practicing his make-up skills on me in my apartment. We made a makeshift beauty parlor-cum-photo studio in my living room for 2 hours. He did it really well :) He knows more make-up than I do. Different layers for eyeshadow. Blending colors. Thickness. Thinness. How come he knows that the skin in our eyelids are 4x thinner than our normal skin? The answer is just because he is gay.

We took photos after, ala CosmoMag photo shoot, realizing that this could be his first step in realizing his passion to make at least one woman beautiful everyday. (The hardest step to take is the first step you take.)

We had dinner at the East Village and headed up to East 60th St. at a (gay) piano bar. There I saw all kinds of gay men. The decent, quiet type. The rowdy type. The bondage freak. The man-looking. The lady-looking. The drag. And more! I was thrilled!

It was 12:47am. I donned my Clinique made-up face and a Single Bailey's with two cherries. My arms on the Baby grand, listening to my good friend enunciate his huge baritone voice out of his small body, as the piano player does it in Key of C. A smile of enjoyment on my face.

Enter Italian gay who claims to be an artist who does art and ballet.

"You're beautiful."

"Excuse me?"

"You look very beautiful."

"Why thank you, that's a very flattering compliment coming from a gay guy.", I beamed.

"I'm Rarfrrulel...And who's gay?" (I really couldn't understand what he was saying, it's the alcohol)

"You are? Aren't you?..." (with doubts and questions in my head)

"No, I'm straight."

"Oh, I didn't realize. I'm so, so, so sorry (profusely), I thought there are no straight men here! But thanks for the compliment."

(moment of awkwardness as he stares at my face for 10 secs) "Uhm, that's my friend there, he's really good in singing!"

"What's your number?", he asked.

"Excuse me?" (I pretended to not hear)

"I'd like to call you."

My cellphone rings. It's my cousin, TJ. He's outside the bar and will be crashing at my place for the night. Alleluia my cousin's a guy! And alleluia he lives in Jamaica to needs to sleep in my place tonight!

He walked inside and said hello to me.

"Oh, Ted, this is Rafael.... you're Rafael right? Yeah. Well, this is Ted, my boyfriend."

Wahahaha.

Confused Italian gay (who claims to be a straight artist who does art and ballet) pirouettes away. (go home and do your artistic ballet, dah-ling!)

I did say earlier that gay men are normal people. But there really are exceptions in this world and we just have to accept - and love them, without squinting, that they are just gay as gay can get.

A New York Moment

There are different kinds of moments in life. There are sentimental moments, crazy moments, low moments and perfect moments. (I generalized, but feel free to add more specific categories if you will - for example: moments-when-you-want-to-see-your-closet-ex-suffer-as-you-
move-on-with-your-hot-and-handsome-new-boyfriend, or... moments-when-you-feel-like-singing-Classic Pinoy-karaoke-songs-like-Anak by Freddie Aguilar-to-your-heart's-content). Ok, that's overdoing it.

And then, there's the "New York moment" - a unique breed of "moments" that can never happen anywhere else, but where? I already said it. New York City.

I had one just hours ago, and I can't help but write about it as soon as I got back to my apartment.

After a long school week of pure Mercury retrograde, homesickness and three quizzes (not to mention a tricky Statistics test -- factorials, normal distribution, standard normal, n choose x (what the...?) et. al), I went out with my cousin Ted and a friend, Clarissa. We were deciding whether to watch a The Aviator at West 42nd or have dinner somewhere? But the idea of going to Serendipity popped up ( It's located at 60th between 2nd and 3rd). We were coming from 45th and 5th and were thinking of cabbing it, but we decided to just walk. The weather was cooperative and so, we headed 15 blocks north.

(That's not the New York moment, yet.)

Walking along Park Ave., right across the Waldorf Astoria, we were all just yakking about shallow stuff, talking about funny incidents or showbiz or jologisms and stuff like that.

(Here goes.)

Out of nowhere, this man, an NYPD police officer- police uniform-clad, probably his early 30s, all smiles - came up to me -- and handed me a rose. A long-stemmed pink rose.

(There.)

What a surprise! :)

In the middle of our yakking, I paused..., and was stunned... and I forget if I was even able to say a gentle "Thank You". Did I?

I think I smiled?... Oh yeah, I did. And I walked on...

In my mind, I thought "Wait a minute... what just happened?", then TJ and Clarissa (witnesses) were screaming in kilig and declared, "It's a perfect New York moment!". My lips widened to the corners of my face, and I agreed. It indeed was a perfect ending for my tough school week. Oh, and it is a New York moment. A good one.

So there. When we got to Serendipity and binged on 3 kinds of desserts (all huge and about 2,000 calories each, of course!), we talked about serendipitous and unexpected moments; wondering what happened to that nice policeman who carried a pink rose in the middle of the city and happened to be right where we were walking into. Did he have a dozen and gave each of the first 12 women who walked by? Was he just gay and loved flowers? Did he follow us and bought a rose along the way? Who knows? There are millions of versions.

In this city, you never really know who, how, when, or why you will stumble upon a person or stranger-- a celebrity, a homeless guy, an old friend, or a policeman, at that. And when you do, that stumbling could make or break your day or week. (especially during a Mercury Retrograde)

I still have the pink rose with me, and it's sitting in a tall ice-tea glass half-filled with lukewarm water. It's nice.

That's just how it is here in New York City.
You collect New York moments, remember them, forget them, smile, and walk on...


P.S. I didn't bring my camera with me, but TJ had his, so I'll post a picture of the rose next time.

Might is not a bad word, speak moderately

I just watched “Sideways” (stars Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church) – and it was pretty good. It’s about two friends who set off to wine valleys in California, imbibing as much Pinot along the way, stumbling upon depression, reflection and desire, ending up in comedic misadventures and eventually right where they began.

I am not a movie critic, and I don’t do movie reviews on Entertainment Weekly, but all I can say is that it’s “pretty good”. Not “super good” because I am partial to movies with a kick of romance. This one’s love story was pretty dry and banal.

I actually watched with my two pretty friends from Manila, who are now sharing the New York experience with me. We did the quintessential “Girls’-FRIDAY-Night-Out” – just a night out of movie and chin-wagging about boyfriends (i.e. men-who-make-us-go-aww), LDR’s and work over dinner.

So the scenario looked like this: Jam-packed UES Casual Italian dining restaurant, back-end table, Penne ala Vodka, Make-your-own pizza, crisp Italian salad and hungry stomachs. Seated were 3 ladies: A US Resident who left home to acquire US citizenship, an Expatriate who didn’t miss out on a good opportunity, and a Grad Student with big hopes and dreams – all infused with spirit, all heart, all Pinay.

We all have different reasons why we are here. And as routine as it seems, we were asking the age-old FOB Pinoy-in-the-US question to each other, even with our mouths full,

“So, anong balak mo? Babalik ka pa ba or dito ka na?” (in pure Tagalog)

And this was how it went:

US Resident: Yeah! If need be, I wouldn’t sacrifice my loved ones over my citizenship!

Expatriate: (Adamantly) Of course, there’s no place like home!

Grad student: (batting an eyelash) I might stay. Depending on how things go…

Guess who sounded like a puberty-stricken-young-adolescent-who-couldn’t-decide-for- herself-while-being-eaten and-overpowered-by-peer-pressure? Yes, the one who said “might”. It was I.

I might?!? What the…?

When did I ever use might when faced with a question like that? I can use might – as in “Pam, so are you staying in the US for good?”, “A mighty yes!”, said I.

That is typically me.

But now that my New York honeymoon stage has worn off, I am including might into my vocabulary again? When did this grey area, in-between, somewhere-out-there, blah, impulsive indecision come about?

I need to see a Broadway show – fast.

How annoyingly apt that we watched a movie, telling of a story which brought the lead character to where he began. Not an omen. Not cool.

Hey, come to think of it, Might is not a bad word, and I shall justify. Might is the almost-doesn't-count of "no" or "yes", which means it is not valid as a clear agreement or disagreement to something. More so, it may have been said during a state of confusion and distraction to external objects (like Italian food), thus, said without the perfect rational mental state.

So there. And in my rational mental state, I would say the ff:

They say that home is where the heart is. And my home is in Manila. But my heart belongs to the world. And my world belongs to this man-that-makes-me-go-aww.

Aah, who cares if I say might once? As without a doubt, I will say aww twice, thrice, a thousand times.