Naked lunches

ASIDE from a bed, the most intimate thing one can share with another is a meal.

Filipinos bond over food. Unashamedly, colleagues scrutinize each other’s lunch. We sample each other’s hastily packed breakfast or the remnants of a family feast or the unclassifiable weekend experiment.

We masticate failed affairs, office power struggles, jokes/politics and the state of our health as carefully as the P20 fried fish, P8 rice, P6 banana and P6 mongo soup the street vendor handed over the gate to us.

Working lunches may be a modern necessity—or inefficiency, depending on one’s experience. In the multicultural organization I worked with in the 1980s, technical meetings usually extended till 2 p.m. We, Filipinos, did not complain but the expatriates noticed that between 11 a.m. till adjournment, our participation quite drastically faded.

So sandwiches were served. The reception rose a little higher than glum. An expat married to a Filipina suggested a “regular” lunch, meaning rice, viands and softdrinks.

However, this scheme was also scrapped due to the overwhelmingly enthusiastic local response. The business of having lunch—involving much passing to and fro of plates, pairing of mismatched cutlery, the collective frenzy for meat, asking for sawsawan (sauce)—took over the official business at hand.

Work productivity improved when we decided to break at noon and resume an hour after everyone ate lunch. A consultant was driven to ask, though, why few of us sat at the conference table with them, with most preferring to return to our nooks or cram in the pantry.

I said that we wanted a break from speaking in English. A more candid answer should have been: talking about work messed up the food as it was going down; you could not eat with the boss because the boss was sometimes the main entrée in these lunches; and who could lean over and tell an expat: say, can I have some of those greens?

When one eats in company, there are three things to savor: the food, the company of others, your own. Is there some of that tough beef stuck in my smile? Do my lips betray the squid cooked in inky broth? After a good meal, my friends and I burp musically in three voices, lean back and puff with our toothpicks, wiggle our tongues to dislodge and swallow the last clinging holdouts. So what? We still share lunch.

Lunch tastes best when the company transports me to the familiar and the homely be-as-you-are. Precisely because of these ordinary but intimate associations, lunch can be sacrosanct grounds that permit few transgressions.

As part of a couple, I don’t have a habit of lunching out with any male friend. College chums would rather email or post on my Facebook wall rather than wait for me to confirm a lunch date only after telling my spouse, sons, mother, companions at home, sundry relatives and dog (with whom I share Wednesday and Friday lunch regularly).

As a contributor to this space and as a freelancer, I tell my editors the clients I lunch with. Editors are an anal-retentive lot. They have to be to spot bias that’s caused either by external parties corrupting a journalist or a journalist self-censoring to slant an article to favor or cover up on a client.

As a Catholic, I’m more than a bit bugged why Carlos Celdran recently disrupted mass at the Manila Cathedral to protest the clergy’s opposition to contraception. The popular tour guide regularly distributes condoms and birth-control pills to the poor. I, too, think that reproductive health information should be made available to couples. Staging a stunt during mass, which represents both a shared meal and a memorial sacrifice, will close no chasms that’s yawning between the state and the clergy.

Lunch? Best taken without agenda.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917-3226131)

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Oct. 3, 2010 issue of “Matamata”

"Tuli"

I WAS proud to correctly say the word to the clinic receptionist. Had I not tirelessly wound my tongue around the word--"circumcision"--so that I could make it less cumbersome when I first mentioned it to Juan exactly a summer ago?

But after pronouncing it to the young woman setting down our May 1 appointment, as well as to the roomful of patients bored from waiting for the surgeons, I realized that I only chose the English word to put some distance to an inevitability I had not fully accepted.

When another clinic staff bade my nine-year-old son to approach the scales, the receptionist casually remarked to her companion that he was scheduled for "tuli." She repeated the word again when another mother walked in, pulling along a worried-looking boy . "For circumcision, Miss." "Okay, Ma'am, P1,500 'ang tuli'."

Lack of respect for privacy may be typical in the country, not just in its clinics. But in the case of circumcision, the informality approaches the level of unblinking acceptance with which one follows the habits of the sun, the falling behind of salaries from rising prices. Isn't circumcision more than a medical procedure? It is an age-defining summer ritual, painful, more dramatic and thus more prestigious than the May procession of young girls dressed up as angels. As they say, the blood and sweat turn it into what it is: a rite of passage separating the men from the boys.

When Juan made the decision to get circumcised this May, it was partly driven by the self-consciousness he faced while showering with his classmates or facing down the teasing of his older brother. But he picked the specific week for the appointment after we went on a trip to the south, where we saw several boys wearing oversized shirts in the towns we passed by. Though the shirts reaching below their knees made them seem like girlish caricatures, they must have convinced Juan to finally get it over with. Playing tag, watching the passing buses or licking an ice drop, these boys must have towered like free men, liberated finally from one crucial test of manhood.

What should a mother of sons do, for whom the rigors of manliness seem such a messy business that should involve only gladiators, not boys whose head still smell of hours of playing under the sun?

I emailed my sister, lucky to have only daughters who will never have to put up their fists to challenge chants of "pisot (uncircumcised)."

In Australia, my sister emailed back, nearly all doctors do not perform circumcision as it is perceived as having few clear benefits. The operation is lumped along with genital mutilation and found to be abhorrent. Only a few Pinoy doctors will perform it; many parents who want their sons to be circumcised have to return to the Philippines. Since complete healing takes place from two to three weeks, it is a steep expense for those opting for this.

Some of my sisters' relations and friends have decided not to have their sons circumcised. They will teach their boys how to clean the area covered by the foreskin. In older boys and adult men, the foreskin naturally retracts to facilitate proper hygiene.

In the land of "tuli" and "pisot," there is no real contest. I sat for hours in a room where women talked about rivers of blood gushing from a nicked vein and tips for preventing "nagkamatis (swollen like a ripe tomato)"--wear a brief until full healing, do not throw a tomato at the bandaged member, grant whatever the boy wants before, not after, when he will take forever to waddle to places.

When Juan sauntered out with his father, I understood why they still make movies about gladiators, never about their mothers (unless you can squeeze a statement from someone in a dead faint).

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131


* Published in Sun.Star Cebu's May 4, 2008 issue