Love and Loss in the Windy City Part 1

Me and Kimberly by the river on our first night in Chicago

BUZZ, BUZZ, BUZZ. BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ.  My phone’s vibrations rudely awakened me on my first night in Chicago. Kimberly and I had planned the trip be a romantic getaway—a time to relax, to celebrate, and to create joyful memories. Though young, our relationship had already been a rollercoaster, filled with high highs and some low lows. In a way, Chicago was supposed to be a chance to remind ourselves why we fell for each other in the first place.

I had just found out I was admitted to UCLA Law School and we had just gone out with some of my close college friends the night before. We couldn’t wait to explore everything the Windy City had to offer—cityscapes, food, art, and even Kobe Bryant’s final game in Chicago. There was so much to celebrate!

BUZZ, BUZZ, BUZZ. I was a little hungover and sort of disoriented as I woke up in a bed other than my own. I peered over at my phone screen and saw that it was my mom. What does she want? I figured it was another case of my mom feelings the pains of having an empty nest while taking care of my father. It had been years since he was diagnosed with end stage kidney disease and over a year since he had suffered a near-fatal heart attack. While I always tried my best to be there for my mom, she could be overbearing at times. Really Mom, 8:30 on a Saturday Morning?

Then I realized something—while it was already 8:30 AM in Chicago, it was only 6:30 AM back in California. Something was wrong. The phone buzzed again. BUZZ, BUZZ, BUZZ. I picked it up and my worst fears were confirmed. On the other end of the line was my mother, holding back her sobs while she told me “Jimmy, he’s gone.” My heart sank as the reality of those three words hit me like a freight train. I turned over in bed and could barely tell Kimberly what happened.

Room (and sexy shower) at the Dana Hotel

The next hour or so was a frantic blur. I thought of all the things I would never have the chance to do with my dad. He wouldn’t see me off to law school, wouldn’t see me get married, wouldn’t play with my children as Lolo. Kimberly held me and consoled me and my initial shock subsided as I started to figure out my next steps. Should we go back? Of course we needed to go back—nothing else mattered! I shouted in anger. I looked up flights and spent a considerable amount of time on the phone with Virgin Airlines, who eventually placed us on a flight at 5:45PM that afternoon. I wished I had a helicopter or floo powder as I wanted to be with my family right away. I felt guilty that I couldn’t be there with them. Why now? I asked myself.

Ever thoughtful, Kimberly offered to go out and get us something to eat. I mulled it over and realized that we still had about 4-5 hours before we needed to be at the airport. I could either mourn in my hotel room, or go out and reflect on my loss on the streets of Chicago. I opted for the latter—after all, neither Kimberly nor I had been there before. We figured we might as well make the most of the time we had left there. We stared at the bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label that we had opened the night before, still over half-full. We poured drinks and toasted to my father as I played songs like “Dance with my Father,” “My Way,” “I’ll be Missing You."  We took our last sips of whisky and headed out into the city.

TO BE CONTINUED

burn, burn, burn

Once upon a time at my high school graduation, I stared at a football stadium full of people and I quoted Jack Kerouac's character, Sal, from On the Road. Early in Kerouac's novel, Sal explains:

“...the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

At the time I was wide eyed and full of idealistic energy. I proudly quoted the beatnik writer as an advocate for a life passionately lived. I was sure that I would use the words as a mantra while I set the world ablaze. Though I lacked direction, I did know that whatever I'd end up doing, I wanted it to mean something. I wanted to be a force unpredictable, even if that meant a facing some danger along the way.

Fast forward several years, and living up to my expectations became a lot tougher. But then 50-60 hours of work a week happened. A court case happened. Then working with one of the most at-risk populations, the hardest grade level, and chaotic workplaces happened. Then bad habits happened. Anxiety happened. Traumatic life events happened. A strained, and at times problematic, relationship happened. Survival mode happened.

Now, a full 7 years into adulthood later, it's time to check myself: am I one of the mad ones? Not quite. The adult me has learned that routines keep you disciplined and reveal your dedication. But can also lead to the commonplace. I've learned that trials of life can leave you feeling beat down, thus creating a desire to seek comfort. While comfort sounds fine and dandy this is an idea that I once publicly dismissed. These are adult things that I've used to cope with all that's been tough. And they've helped-- but at what cost?

Yes, life is hard. And yes, I've been through a lot-- more than I probably could've fathomed at that day I stood behind the podium. But the 18 year old me knows that's not an excuse. So can I still burn like a fabulous yellow roman candle? Or did my flare burn out?

Reap what you sow

Getting a tattoo can be a nerve-wracking process that can involve a lot of questioning and a moderate amount of soul searching. Depending on one's school of thought on getting tattooed, these questions one might ask include: what? where (both place and placement)? in what style? by whom? why? ARE YOU SURE? when? ARE YOU REALLY SURE? Some people get tattooed for "deep" reasons (connecting with culture, a visceral memory, affiliation to faith or gang), some as an expression of personality, some for more aesthetic reasons (these monmon cats look dope af!). None of these are wrong way. 

If you really think those monmon cats are just plain cool, you're not alone, because I do, too. A tattoo is a personal expression, meaning that the judgement that ultimately matters comes from the wearer. 

That all being said, I figured I'd blog to document my process of getting my most recent ink: freehand lettering that says "Reap what you sow" done by Tony Salgado at Por Vida Tattoo in Upland, California (IE REPRESENT!)

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"But peace to the people who don't ever preach in the front of a classroom. All day long, planting seeds of revolution, We dedicate this song."

- bars from "Commencement Day" by Blue Scholars

"A classroom is always a reflection of its teacher."

- teaching wisdom

I'm not sure where, or from who I first heard that a classroom reflects its teacher, but it's a truth that I've come to sincerely believe. Sometimes this is a bitter pill to swallow. If your student's are disorganized, a reflective teacher asks "how am I facilitating their organization?" If students display negativity, either in attitude or language, a reflective teacher asks "how am I fostering a culture of positivity?" This idea makes a lot of sense-- our youth are impressionable, reactive, and learn from adults that serve as role models. While it's impossible for even master teachers to dictate every single thing that happens within the walls of their classroom, I have found it essential to my practice to ask myself why certain things happen. Why is Tyrone reacting like that? What seeds am I planting? It's almost impossible for teachers to see or predict the impact their practice might have on a student. Instead, we must have faith that we're sowing and watering the right seeds. (Please grow to be a revolutionary, a lifelong learner, a good person, please!)

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As the screenshot from urban dictionary above points out, "Reap what you sow" has biblical origins. The part of Galatians that this comes from is referred to by some Biblical scholars as the Law of Christ, which essentially functions as a New Testament fulfillment of the Ten Commandments. As beautifully stated by whoever wrote that urban dictionary entry, it is an expression of "the basic nature of God's justice." It alludes to nature in a literal sense-- reap and sow are verbs borrowed from agriculture. And if you can't tell by the name of this blog, nature metaphors work for me. 

After all, if the nature of the universe resembles the natural world around us, this makes sense (and not in an exclusively Christian way). Not only are we told this by soil that grows the food that nourishes us, we were taught this when we learned about "cause and effect" in elementary school. We're even told this by music artists like the New Radicals ("we only get what we give!") and Kendrick Lamar on "Alright." The prodigious emcee spits "Lord knows 20 of 'em in my Chevy, tell 'em all to come and get me Reapin' everything I sow, so my karma come," reminding us that this biblical idea isn't all that different from Eastern karma.  

This is important to remember in a world where countless years of injustice have led to systems of oppression that have made justice complicated, convoluted, and difficult to attain. As I continue to ponder attending law school, the nature of justice is something I always want to have in the back of my mind, now aided by the words on the top of my chest. 

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This tattoo, like my first two, are done in the black and grey tradition that is native to Southern California, to barrios, to prisons and to OGs. While I'm acutely aware that I am not Chicano, I did grow up in the Inland Empire, and developed an aesthetic tastes while surrounded by diverse cultures. Black and grey and lettering tattoos are things that I've seen around me my whole life. While American traditional, Japanese, and Pacific Island style tattoos all pique my attention, black and grey has felt right to me so far. 

Tony Salgado does great black and grey work, and lettering in particular. His work speaks for itself, and he's as West Coast OG as they come (he schooled me on the 909s own Suga free!). His shop, Por Vida Tattoo, is located in none other than the city in which I was reaped: Upland, California.

Reunited: A Sneakhead's Love Affair

 "Chamber of Fear" Nike Ad from the 2004/2005 NBA season

By the time I was 14 years old, the sneakerhead bug had already bit me. I had been one of the first kids at my junior high to rock Nike Dunks. I regularly lurked Niketalk.com and Kicksology.net to learn about release dates, read up on performance reviews, and look at as many high quality pictures as my slow, early 2000s internet connection would allow. But it wasn't until December 2004 until I owned my first athlete-inspired signature shoe: the Nike Zoom LeBron II.

Masked LeBron going up for a layup against Lamar n the II's

Now don't get me wrong, I had owned plenty of memorable sneakers prior to this. Whether we're talking And 1 shoes like the flashy Silky Smooth or Nike Basketball performance beasts like the Zoom Flight Turbine or the Zoom Ultraflight, I always made sure I laced up something nice for my Rancho Cucamonga city league games. But coming from an immigrant Pilipino family, I had always been taught to spend frugally and look for the best deals possible. More often than not, this meant shying away from the often more expensive, hype-driven athlete signature models (no Jordans for this kid or Adidas Kobes for this kid!). 

That all changed with the LeBron II. I remember first seeing pictures of them on Niketalk and being hooked. The shoe had a lot going for it: a Double-stacked, full length Zoom Air unit promised for a responsive cushioning setup that would be conducive for attacking the basket. Nike had just started to use laser-engraving technologies to provide ornate decoration. The shoe's shape and strap took style cues from the ever-popular Air Force 1, and provided a great lock down fit in addition to style points. The "Chamber of Fear" advertising campaign inspired by Bruce Lee and Wu-Tang Clan was imaginative, fueled the hype, and sent me some limited promotional items that I still have today.

Promo Poster, still up in my
room at my Parents'

On top of all that, the shoe had a hell of an endorsing athlete. King James was in just his second year in the league, and was already living up to hype, having averaged 20/6/5 during his rookie campaign. I had been a LeBron fan since his Junior year of high school, when he wrote the diary column in SLAM magazine. He was a 6'8" with the court vision that rivaled any point guard and could jump out of the gym. While still young, he played with unselfishness, flare, and tenacity. Back then, LeBron was pretty much universal likeable (Oh, how times have changed...).

And so in December 2004, I ponied up about $90 to buy them, using a 30% Friends and Family coupon to buy them at Footlocker at the  Montclair Plaza Mall. It was the most I had ever paid for a pair of shoes. I rocked the shit out of them throughout 2 city league seasons, fearlessly taking it to the hoop knowing my feet were locked down, ankles were secure, and that I would have impact protection on the way down. My homie, Karl, bought em too, and we went through a whole season as teammates terrorizing opposing backcourts while looking fly with matching kicks and haircuts (see video below). I rocked them for hooping, casually, to church, and pretty much everywhere else.



Then I let my next door neighbor, Errol, borrow them for some reason and he lost them or something. I'm not sure why I let him (never letting you borrow my shit again Eggroll!), but I thought that was the end for my love affair with the Zoom LeBron II.

And it was! Until I finally, after 10 years and many subsequent pairs of Nike basketball signature shoes that I loved ALMOST as much, hunted down a pair on eBay. I'm nowhere NEAR as big a LeBron fan I was then (you lost me when you left Cleveland, and have yet to regain me now that you're back), but I still love this shoe. And what's not to love? Double-stacked full-length Zoom Air for less than one bill? Nike hardly puts a single-stacked full-length zoom air in kicks anymore! Reunited, and the cushioning STILL feels so good.

my recently purchased pair. thank you eBay!

when life gives you calamnsi: lomo saltado!

So my mom has a calamansi (Pilipino citrus, sort of similar in flavor profile to a lime) in our backyard. And when life gives you calamansi, the possibilities are endless. Calamnsi juice, bistek, a dipping sauce for lechon, a marinade for meat/seafood, squeezed on top of your pancit or arroz caldo-- ENDLESS!

I, however, decided to take things in a different direction. Since I had just cooked something #hellapilipino, I decided to instead cook a Peruvian dish (and one of my favorite dishes of all time) lomo saltado. What's cool about lomo saltado is that it actually is a chifa, or Chinese-Peruvian stirfry dish. The Chinese, many of whom were brought to Peru as laborers in the 19th and 20th century used cantonese cooking methods and ingredients (rice vinegar, soy sauce) with new world ingredients (potato and tomato).

As a Pilipino-Chinese American, feels close to my roots. A little reading uncovered that Chinese immigration to Peru has its first roots in the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade that was responsible for bringing some of the first Pilipinos and Chinese to the Americas. Given all this history, I felt it appropriate to use calamansi, a Filipino ingredient, as a substitute for rice vinegar, the more traditional acid.

To get started, I marinated pre-cut strips of sirloin (about a pound and a quarter) in a marinade of 2 tbsp soy sauce, 2 tbsp canola oil, hella calamansi (probably 6-8), a splash of rice wine vinegar, 3 minced cloves of garlic, and cumin, paprika, salt and pepper (to taste). I also put some beer in the marinade. Beer acts as a tenderizer, but I mostly just wanted an excuse to open a beer, since I only used a third of the bottle for the marinade. I took about half that marinade and put it in another bowl with a red onion (sliced in slivers). The meat and the onion get to swim in the marinade for at least an hour, so everything can make a flavor-packed Chino-Latino marriage.

A word of caution: making lomo saltado involves making french fries that are later tossed with the stir-fry. This will make it extremely hard to resist eating french fries while completing your cooking! I cut up and fried 2 yukon gold potatoes while waiting for the meat to marinate, and managed to eat fewer than I can count on one hand. Or maybe it was fewer than I could fit in one hand full? 

Once that was done, got some oil nice and hot in a large pan (couldn't find my mom's wok) then got going with the stir-frying. First I seasoned the meat with a little more salt, pepper, cumin, and paprika the meat brown with the marinade , then added tomatoes and let it simmer for a couple minutes. Then I added the onions, hot yellow pepper, and cilantro.

To finish it off, the stir-fry is tossed with the french fries and plated over white rice.

 While fusion might be considered a "food trend," the best fusion often comes out of necessity, when people are given a new ingredient to place within their culinary canon. In my case, the ingredient was calamansi, and the result was delicious!

certified #hellapilipino embutido sliders

 "Faithful friends, who are dear to us, gather near to us once more" Just like the song says, the holiday season never fails to bring people together, and these holidays have been no different. This past Sunday, former members of Filipino Choir from St. Peter St. Paul got together for our annual Christmas potluck and white elephant. I used this as an excuse to cook embutido, a Pilipino meatloaf that is traditionally made around the holidays.

For those who are unfamilar, embutido is one of those "throw everything into one bowl and mix it" type dishes,  with about a dozen ingredients all held together in a loaf of ground pork. The loaf is steamed, then sliced and can then be eaten either hot or cold, as finger food or, as I served it, in pan de sal sliders.

My embutido included the following: ground pork, chinese sausage, vienna sausage, hardboiled egg, carrot, raisins, red and green bell peppers, green onions, garlic. I used panko breadcrumbs and eggs as binding agents, and seasoned with salt and pepper. In lieu of having an actual steamer, I half-filled a baking pan with hot water, placed the embutido (rolled in foil) in the water, and let it steam for an hour in a 350 degree oven. 

To get saucy and dress the sliders, I made some atchara (pickled green papaya) and a banana ketchup/sriracha mayo. Damn, atchara and a sauce with banana ketchup? Das #hellapilipino!

The end product was pretty dang good and got eaten up. Before the potluck, I let my mom try some. While she had a few critiques, she commended me for even trying, and said that most kids wouldn't even bother to learn a recipe like that. That felt good-- mostly because I could tell that there was truth in that. Embutido isn't exactly the most popular or sexy well-known Pilipino recipe, but I hope to refine how I cook and package it to help keep it relevant for folks.

Walk on the Sun

"You know, this is the first time I've felt the sun in two months."

While every ounce of my being has been acutely aware that my father been in the hospital since before Halloween, his words caught me off guard. But the more I thought about it, the more it made so much damn sense. After all, this was the same sun that beat down on him as a boy, raised in Bailen and Manila. The same sun that he chased across the Pacific when he joined the US Navy. Even the same one that shone down on us on a Saturday morning, when I was about 9 years old, and my dad taught me how to shoot at bank shot.

So as my dad sat there, basking in the sun's golden rays in all their glory, I reflected. I had thought this was merely the first of many trips back to the hospital that we had gotten to know all too well. However, my father saw this as an opportunity to reunite with an old friend. His face expressed a sense of peace that I hadn't seen in too long. And so I sat there with him, in the sun, taking it all in and realizing the profundity of the simple moment.

It made so much sense. In literature, sun is a symbol of power, energy, and vitality. In high school biology, we learn the sun is literally responsible for nourishing the Earth and its creatures. It tells our society when to wake our ass up and get to work. It even adorns the Philippine flag (and Pilipino flags that date back to the Katipunan). I'd imagine that, when compared to the cold, florescent light of the hospital rooms my father stayed in, the sun might even remind my mostly non-religious father that there very well may be a God out there.

And yet, like many other simple pleasures of life, I had taken the sun for granted. I hadn't fully realized what being away from the sun for two months might mean for my  dad. Not until he asked me to push his wheelchair out in front of the hospital, and into the heat of an abnormally warm December day.

While we have quite a ways to go to recover my father's health, at least he can feel the warmth of an old friend, once again.