The Wily Filipino

The Weekend.

Friday was Madeline's birthday, so poor Izzy got shuttled from one day care place to another (she would be coming with us the next day) and I took Madeline out to dinner at Chapeau!, one of our favorite restaurants in the Richmond. Sweetbreads, basil soup, heirloom tomatoes, bottle full of bub. And I got her, among other things, Jhumpa Lahiri's novel, so Madeline stayed up all night trying to finish the lackluster Elizabeth George mystery she was slowly reading before.

And then the next morning -- and this is the sort of thing that only young parents can get excited about -- Izzy actually peed in her potty!

The next day it was lunch at Le Cheval with our friends Alice and Jens; we also realized we hadn't been to downtown Oakland in over four years! All the Jerry Brown-revitalized buildings -- the new apartments, the Museum of Children's Art -- were completely new to us; I seem to remember only vacant parking lots in that part of town last time I was there. Lemongrass prawns, porkchops in something or other (can't remember), and the best mussels in the world.

Last night Barbara Jane Reyes, in her second reading of the day (how does she do it?), read one of my favorite poems from her book Gravities of Center: this was "Anthropologic," a piece which at first seemed practically impossible to read, heavily reliant as it was on its layout on the printed page. I think it worked great though, especially with the big Santiago Bose painting behind her, but she said she wasn't going to read it ever again. (Alas, she didn't read one of my other favorites, "Heaven Is Just Another Concept:" "If poetry drives us all to madness, then I know no logic to dictate any measure of realignment.")

Aimee Nezhukumatathil had the audience cracking up with her poems; it's interesting how the humor (at least for me) bubbles up to the surface in the act of reading. On the page I tend to pay closer attention to how the words work -- stupid of me not to step back and listen to how funny the bigger picture is.

Today Madeline and Izzy went to a pregnant colleague's jealous-sibling consolation party (don't ask), and I went with the dog to Fort Funston for some offleash walking. Unfortunately, Shelby didn't really want to walk, and so I ended up getting back into the car to buy a cake in South San Francisco for our pregnant colleague's baby shower.

I pulled into the restaurant's parking lot and got out of the car, only to discover in disgust that I had run over a used condom on the ground. (The Trojan wrapper was right next to it.) It was then that I realized that the weekend had practically been bookended by encounters with the highs and lows of Filipino American culture: a terrific poetry reading one night (yay!), and sex in a South City Goldilocks parking lot (yuck!).

Posted by the wily filipino at October 5, 2003 05:02 PM