I'm Very Big in Asia, Just Like Zac Effron and Korean Pop Stars

Or, Now Is the Typhoon Season of Our Discontent

So I don't know if you guys heard, but 1) I'm on the other side of the world!, and 2) I'm totes a pretentious fuck. That being said, the first installment of my Filipino blog series (maybe they will pick it up as a Filipino tv show complete with games, midgets, and sexy ladies) is an introduction to the cast of characters here (actually, just my grandparents, really) written in the third person. That was really just a device to get the introduction started, and it felt really stupid afterward, but it sort of eventually became too late to change, and so it remained.

I have a lot more to say and a muddled melange of ways in which I may decide to say them, but that's for another time, possibly drunk or in list form or in both. I'm sort of in sensory overload right now, so forgive me if my reaction has been to mute the colors.

H'okay!
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Katrina Casino was not a pen name—you can check, it says it right there on her birth certificate. Katrina Casino was a writer, and therefore, she did writerly things. Absent-minded and spaced out, she wandered through the mundane occurrences of her days imagining the metaphors or complicated verb-adverb combinations that would one day make her feel brilliant, artsy.

She sat cross-legged on couches in the middle of the afternoon while everyone was sleeping, laptop open, coffee untouched, doing her writerly duties—that is, leaving a blinking cursor lonely on a new Microsoft Word document while she spent copious amounts of time on Facebook, Twitter, AIM. She had no concept of time, except when it came to deadlines, and even then, it was a bit questionable. As a writer, a blogger, a music journalist, she touted her hip, contemporary occupation when around those of her generation, but hid it behind a reluctant business degree when talking to elders and relations, as this usually solicited disapproving head shakes and pitying advice.

This was a lesson learned best when she visited her grandmother, a woman who, in her younger days could both drink her brothers’ friends under the table and design and repair her sisters’ dresses. As a mother, she stayed up weekend nights waiting for her prodigal sons to arrive home so that she could beat them with a rolled up copy of that morning’s newspaper and berate them for making their mother stay up and worry. Nowadays she was an immensely talkative and wonderfully cockeyed grandmother whose half-squint couldn’t help but elicit suppressed giggles from those whom she scolded.

“Don’t study communications!” she exclaimed upon Katrina’s confession concerning writerly ambitions. “Everybody knows how to communicate, they all just talk-talk,” she said as she leaned in, widening one eye, as she was very serious, “but business, that’s how you make money!”

It was all very…Filipino.

Very Filipino, just like her grandmother’s tendency to add extra syllables to everyday words like lipstick (lipeestick) or upstairs (upeethestairss), or her aunt’s misspoken invitation to the movies. “Come with us to see Transformer!” (only one).

While all this transpired, Nicasio Costiniano sat at the dining table, smoothing out the creases in the linen. Katrina’s grandfather was now a man of few words, affection and approval coming in the form of exchanges like, “You reading a book?” Yes. “Good,” though years ago he was an engineer, designing runways for the military in the War and playing the piano at bars to pick up extra scratch. Ten years ago he could be found on the front lawn of the Casino household, instructing pavers on how to reconstruct the Casino driveway. Six inches of sand, four inches of gravel, a layer of cement. You didn’t have to, but goddamn, if you wanted to, you could land an aircraft on that motherfucker.

Nicasio could always be spotted around the house in his characteristic white t-shirt and boxers. The women lounged around in loose, floral printed dresses that they called dusters. Everyone knew that this was a euphemism for mumu, though no one really realized they were creating a euphemism for mumu, or that they thought one necessary at all. But fuck if Katrina Casino should ever be caught dead in a mumu, or even a duster—what kind of self-respecting tomboy does that—she donned the boys’ uniform, striped boxers and all.