how now brownpau
Now with bonus dog!
I have yet to fly home to Pandora, so all the Caturday I can offer you this weekend is one of the Philippines’ ubiquitous stray cats which I managed to startle under a parked SUV in a church parking lot:
To make up for the lack of any other cat photos, here are a few photos of our black labrador, Nicole, being all lazy and liquid-like:
I’ve spent the last couple of days hanging out at Greenbelt (last night to meet with old friends Tiff and Sonni), and I definitely like what they’ve done to the place. Long time readers will remember my post on Makati’s evolution — one that continues to this day. Witness what has become of that space in the time since then:
As you can see, Greenbelt is still a work in progress; the old shopping arcade behind Greenbelt 1 has now been razed, and will be turned into what I assume will be Greenbelt 5 and 6. It’s a bit sad to see that rickety old building go, with its tiny mom-and-pop shops, but it’s enough consolation to know that Ayala does commercial public spaces really well: lots of sweeping architecture, open outdoor spaces, trees, fountains, and ample sitting room, as evidenced by the areas around Greenbelts 2-4. Lots of good food, too.
This is a sticker on the front of the water dispenser Dad just got. Made in China. We still don’t know what it means, and the hot water spout still doesn’t work. Anyone got an empress handy? We’re fresh out.
This is a Beef Supreme McRice Burger, a beef patty with lettuce and sauce between two patties of molded sticky rice rather than the usual bread bun. It’s apparently been a big hit at Asian McDonald’s outlets, though my friends here in Manila say the P100 price tag for a meal is a bit steep. Coming from the land of $7 lunches, I say $2 is great for a McRice Burger with fries and soda, even at Filipino serving sizes. I’m certain a good part of the price goes to that unique packaging, a pull-and-peel tab affair which makes it possible to eat the rice sandwich without getting the fingers all sticky. McRice Burger, B+ score! (It would get an A if it were just bigger, but again, Filipino serving sizes.)
You’ll be about halfway to the clinic way out in Alabang before you realize you’ve forgotten the panoramic X-Ray you spent 800 pesos on last week to see how straight your wisdom teeth are.
The dentist said that the best thing would be to eventually have them all extracted, but the soonest the oral-maxillofacial surgeon would be available for such a procedure would be two days before your multi-leg flight back home, no part of which would make the post-operative pain and swelling much more fun than it would be normally. Instead, she recommended a simple operculectomy as a stopgap measure until such time that a full extraction could be executed. This is a removal of the operculum, the little extension of gum tissue over the top of a semi-erupted wisdom tooth which traps food particles and makes cleaning difficult. It’s a periodontal procedure, but the surgeon can do it easily, much sooner.
You’ll get the X-Ray and arrive at the clinic an hour late, but the surgeon will be fine with it since she’s running late, too. While you recline in a chair facing towards the highway, you’ll share a laugh over how your second cousin was head of oral-maxillofacial at her med school while she was there. You’ll have to take off your wrist watch, as the thermal cauterizer requires removal of metal from exposed skin, then she’ll inject local anesthesia into your gums in three different spots. She’ll say it’ll sting but it won’t hurt too much, and soon the whole left side of your mouth will be heavy and numb. At any given time there’ll be two or three dental implements and fingers in your mouth, probing, dabbing, cutting, sucking, cauterizing, and sometimes a bit of sensitivity will flash some pain through the anesthesia, but you’re a strong and courageous trooper who isn’t bothered by a little twinge.
The whole time, the surgeon will be explaining how third molars are encased in a sac of tissue which encourage their eruption, but sometimes the sac mucosa can stay around the crown of the tooth and merge with the gum, forming the operculum which covers a semi-erupted wisdom tooth and provides a place for bacteria to thrive and cause pericoronitis. While she talks about this, you’ll ponder on how nice it would be for dentists and periodontists and such to provide little keyboards hooked up to speech units by the reclining chairs for patients to be able to converse, Stephen Hawking style.
The procedure will be done in about fifteen minutes, ending with something like a chewing gum wad placed over the newly exposed crown of your wisdom tooth, to protect it and shape pockets out of your new gumline. The surgeon will tell you to take some over-the-counter pain killer as soon as you get home, and that the worst of the pain and swelling will be within 48 hours, after which it will subside.
Later that day, you’ll go to the barber shop of your childhood for your usual yearly shave and haircut (where “shave” is code for full face and upper body massage with hot towel and maybe a shave), but you’ll find the place closed and abandoned, doors chained up and barber pole dark. The security guard will tell you that it’s gone, but there’s a new barber shop around the corner, where most of the barbers have moved to because the owner of the old barber shop ran out of money. You’ll go to the new barber shop and get a 330 peso shave and haircut, but your childhood barber will have retired earlier this year and the new guy is just a bit too harsh with his massage fingers and a bit too light with the razor. You’ll tip him generously anyway, and look in the mirror to see if your cheek is swelling — it isn’t — and be amazed at how old you look with this new crew cut and those dark circles under your eyes.
Happy Operculectomy Plus Shave and a Haircut Day!
(With apologies to Girls Are Pretty.)
Round these parts we eat our Christmas fruitcake. And enjoy it, too.
Merry Christmas! So I did indeed go to three different worship services yesterday:
This here is the building and sanctuary of Greenhills Christian Fellowship which, despite its name, is not in Greenhills but in Ortigas Center. This was the “born-again” church at which I went to services in the early days of my switch to evangelical Protestantism. GCF is very much a modern megachurch, complete with blocky architecture, Don Moen praise-worship songs, multiple overhead screens showing song lyric animations, and clapping and hand waving from the packed Filipino congregation. (I admit with some wry shame that I was part of this pop-church culture back in more youthful days, when I was a song leader at GCF’s South Metro satellite in Alabang.)
Immediately after morning service at GCF I joined my family over at Mary the Queen, our home parish church, for an 11am Fourth Sunday of Advent Mass. Up until my conversion to evangelical Protestantism, the Jesuit-run MTQ was home church to me, the church of my childhood where my family regularly went for Sunday Mass (except when we were running late and had to go instead to the nearby Santuario de San Jose which had masses starting fifteen minutes later). I was with the choir here as well, a mellow post-Vatican II affair of guitars and mixed voices singing Filipino Catholic standards of the Manoling Francisco variety.
The Christmas Eve Midnight Mass was held with the Bautista clan, a huge branch of relatives on the Ordoveza tree, at their home in Makati. Fr. Unson celebrated the Mass, as always, with a quintessentially Jesuit sermon on the Incarnation, heavy on theology, with quotes from Soren Kierkegaard and Bishop Irenaeus. Music was similarly mellow: guitars and mixed voices, with me backing up the bass section. This was followed by much conversation among cousins, with the consumption of large quantities of goto, lengua, lechon, jamon, and ensaymada.
Tonight, the same clan, along with other branches of the Ordoveza family, all come over to our home here in Greenhills for a Christmas Night Dinner. Even this moment a maid is setting up the chocolate fondue fountain. I know it’s Christmas morning for you folks in the U.S., so a Merry Christmas to you all. I hope that the Chrismanukkawanzaajj Fairy brings you everything you asked him for. Here’s a photo of our Christmas tree:
Good morning. When I sit in the lanai with my iBook facing out to the yard, angled just so, I can just barely pick up a tiny trace of signal from a “linksys” WAP. It is via this tenuous thread of connectivity that I radiate this message out to you.
I spent most of yesterday hunting for a last-minute gift for my brother in “V-Mall,” the shopping center formerly known as “Virra Mall,” whose last pre-renovation days I captured two Christmases ago. Given some time, I will go around there with my camera and take matching “after” photos.
Today is the 24th, Christmas Eve Day, and also the Fourth Sunday of Advent. Roman Catholics this weekend must attend two masses to cover two holy days of obligation: the standard Sunday Advent Mass, and the Christmas Day Mass, usually celebrated as a Midnight Mass here in the Philippines, which means Filipino Catholics will likely be going to church twice within the same day. (My home church, FBCDC, will be having a special morning worship service to segue from Advent to Christmas in one grand event.) In addition, I would like to try and visit early worship at GCF, my old evangelical church in Ortigas, to see how things are going there, so I’ll be attending church in one form or another no less than three times in a day. And I have to go out to V-Mall one more time to pick up gift bags, because I ran out of those last night and I wasn’t able to pack the Morbid Snowmen for lack of room.
Merry Christmas, then, in case I don’t see you. Comments are back on!
