the night before obama won

For the first time, I was grateful I live far from work (or simply far, alright). The long way home would buy time for my body to digest the chao fan, lemon chicken, siomai, and nai cha milk tea I consumed with Jeff and Pyugs, friends from work, that is if it still has power to digest given that it’s way past midnight now.

We (or they) talked about their sad stories.

Pyugs’s was when his mom died while he was in the States (specifically, San Jo-say [in Pyugs’s articulated voice]), how his grandma broke the news, and how he and his siblings reunited after several years for a supposedly happy get-together but really to circle around their mother’s coffin. Being the natural speaker in the family, he delivered the eulogy, saying his mom had always been there with him in his frequent trips to the hospital sickly child as he’d been, but the rare, if not the only, time his mom was hospitalized, he wasn’t there for her. That broke my heart! (By the way, sometimes I imagine giving eulogies more of like the ones in Ally McBeal episodes, talking about the dead, not realizing the gravity of the situation if it actually happens.)

Jeff’s was... well, I don’t remember it being sad. He just went on recounting his years as a student/barista in Maryland. I think the only sad part throughout his turn to speak was when he mentioned about his favorite sad song, Blower’s Daughter, of the movie, Closer, which also made me sad remembering scenes from the movie.

And so the three of us paid the bill; Jeff dropped Pyugs at ABS, then me at Philcoa. Jeff was, the entire time, on a long-distance phone call with his mom, sharing his first live report on TV Patrol on a weekday, having been moved from police shift to Bandila shift. His mom, thinking that it was Jeff’s off today, said she did hear her son’s voice on TV but didn’t care to look at the screen, hence didn’t see him doing the live report. It was funny! (His mom always watches his reports on TV via TFC. I wonder how many times his mom has been late or missed work altogether just to catch his son on TV both doing well and messing up!) Anyway, the entire thing didn’t look like a mom-son talk but more of just a jeff-any friend talk.

These men both looked like mama’s boys to me, how they talked endearingly of and with their moms respectively. But these men are real men (Pyugs may not be physically with his never-fading-always-rosy cheeks always ready to go on-cam for any breaking news, and Jeff with his bakla-disguised-as-conyo language). They are beloved in their respective families, admired in their crafts, and loved in the newsroom. And I’m glad to know them, in a different, deeper level this time.