A Threesome and The Best BJ For My Birthday

"Excess on occasion is exhilarating.  It prevents moderation from acquiring the deadening effect of a habit."

                                   W. Somerset Maugham

I have, unintentionally, let my 35th birthday (a month ago) pass me by.   I have been skating between my "conventional" yuppie day job and my word whoring, er...I mean...ghostwriting gigs, which I work on between breaks and in the evenings.  On my birthdays, I usually treat myself  to something I don't permit myself to indulge in.  This year, I told myself: "I'll take care of it (my birthday)next week."   "Next week" turned into  "7 weeks later."

Since my birthday also happens to be close to my ten-year anniversary as an expatriate, I have been swept over by this insidious bastard of an emotion, the bane of every expatriate's existence called homesickness. It  seems to strike a lot of longtime expats during the ten-year mark.  I definitely was not exempted.   After a decade of living overseas as an adult,  I  can safely sum it up as something like this: homesickness is as elusive as the horizon.  Just when you think you have come close to grasping and mastering its essence, you realize, sooner or later,  that you are nowhere near it as you had initially thought.   It is during this moment of realization where you begin to entertain the thought that perhaps, Johannes Wolfgang von Goethe had you, instead of Faust, in mind  when he wrote these words:

"And here, poor fool, with all my lore I stand no wiser than before." 

 For those of us who choose the expatriate life, we find ways to handle our bouts of homesickness.   A friend of mine, a fellow expat from New York,  deals with her bouts of homesickness by  watching her DVD set of Friends, Seinfeld and Woody Allen films.  So how did a recently-turned-35-year-old expat woman treat herself for homesickness and her birthday? She binges on classic American junk food.   Let's just say that my hips, thighs and waistline's girth are directly proportional to the intensity of my homesickness.   The formula would be something like this:

Let h=hips, t=thighs, w=waistline, H=homesickness;

H=thwk, where k is constant  

Phew!  I still remember my algebra at the ripe old age of 35! 

For the longest time, I have been lusting after the smoothest, richest, milkiest and creamiest BJ to go with a threesome-me, Ben and Jerry.

The ice cream, people!  As in Ben and Jerry's ice cream! 

I know what you're thinking.  I disappear for a month from the blogosphere and you've lowered yourselves down to the gutter??  Shame on you, my readers!

When I arrived in Manila ten years ago, I was a clueless, naive and friendless 24-year-old who was three months away from her 25th birthday.  (Don't ever move to a different place when it's close to your birthday. Spending your birthday in a place where you don't know anyone is the worst experience!  I learned that the hard way. ) I spent many lonely Friday and Saturday nights holed up in my nice hotel that my company was paying for, sampling all the wonderful, first rate pastries that only a first rate hotel can offer.  However, as interesting and exciting as it is to be able to indulge in various foods from different parts of the world, I always come back "home" to mac and cheese and Ben and Jerry's.  I believe this is true for most people.  We always go back "home" to whatever is considered comfort food in our culture.  And, I longed for Ben and Jerry's company during those friendless early days.  Unfortunately, it was unavailable back then.

During that agonizing first year,  on most days, I often found myself having those What-the-hell-did-you-get-yourself-into-moments.  It was during those moments when I truly longed for  Ben and Jerry's emotional support.  Just when I was trying to familiarize myself with Manila, I found myself being away on business for months at a time in Singapore, Hong Kong and Malaysia.  I  wanted to drown myself into a gallon of Chunky Monkey or Cherry Garcia during those exasperating, energy-draining frustrations with the cultural differences and misunderstandings both in and outside the work place, being thrown into one unfamiliar environment after another.

Ben and Jerry's reached these shores about five or six years ago.  I don't indulge myself as often as I'd like.  Not when they're selling it at about $8-9 a pint!

 

 

You think my birthday binging ended with a pint of Chunky Monkey?  Most definitely not.   I delayed my birthday treat, I deserved a corn dog for working non-stop and keeping instant gratification at bay for a month here!  That's how I justified my mindless binging anyway.

What can possibly be more California than Hot Dog On A Stick?  This franchise that was  founded in Venice Beach. It's  is found in just about every mall's  food court in California.  They  usually employed  pretty high school girls. 

Real lemonade is pretty hard to come by here.  Hot Dog On A Stick  is the only place for the real thing.  However, Hot Dog On A Stick is renamed as "Muscle Beach" here in the Philippines.

Just right when I was about to conclude my birthday binge, I decided to venture out of this expat ghetto I live in and explore another neighborhood.  Being a foodie, nothing is more enjoyable than exploring a neighborhood's supermarket.  To my delightful surprise were my childhood favorite candy bars-Three Musketeers!  Nothing makes an expat's heart  race like seeing an old familiar item, foodstuff or otherwise, from home.   Since this particular neighborhood was far from my place, I took home a dozen with me.

Then, two days later, it was truly starting to feel like my birthday when I spotted a full row of  toffee almond  Symphony bars.  While most people hear a symphony, we chocoholics taste a Symphony.   I always remind my mother to include these in the monthly care packages she sends.  Now that they're locally available, my poor mom will be relieved that she won't have  to put up with my incessant Symphonic demands to include these bars.

Homesickness has a way of altering one's habits and behavior.  I have always hated raisins.  I've been hating them for 35 years now.  Naturally, I hate Raisinets.  But, I bought myself a box simply because my sister and friends used to buy them all the time at the movie theaters when we were in our teens.   Somehow Raisinets don't taste as bad when they're shrouded with nostalgia.

And, I threw in the odd Aussie.  When I leave the Asia-Pacific region to return home, Tim Tams, the iconic Australian junk food, will be one of the comfort foods I will be pining for.   I don't care much for the original chocolate version, but I am enthralled by the caramel flavored ones.  These are now available in the American market under Pepperidge Farms but they don't taste quite the same. 


I will be cursing the gym with my presence to work off my newly beleaguered belly, hips and thighs in next coming weeks with my new motto in mind:   "DISPOSE THE ADIPOSE."