Maginahawa Chronicles: Cat Cafe Manila

Research shows that cats can help us deal with our stress. Just by watching your cats do antic tricks already help relieve stress, said David Frei who is the spokesperson for the Delta Society. which is a nonprofit organization interested in relationships between people and animals. 

I was trying to find a way to calm myself and temporarily escape the pressure of school with loads of papers and other requirements, and so I called my childhood friend Brine and invited him to go to Cat Cafe Manila in Maginhawa, Quezon City. I have seen a documentary on Pop Talk that Cat Cafe Manila is a must-try since you can not just have your usual coffee and cupcake, but you can also throw away that stress by mingling with different cats at the cafe.

We had once a cat named Muning and other two stray cats which we named Orange (because of her fur color) and Blue (because of his bright blue eyes). We lost them when we moved away from La Mesa Dam to Bulacan four years ago, and most of the time I missed them because there's nothing like hugging and stroking a cat which calms me down and takes away whatever stressed feelings I have. I remembered how smart Muning was, who would often sneak into our bedroom windows and climb onto our beds to wake us up in early in the morning.

As we entered the Cat Cafe, I was suddenly filled with nostalgia when I saw the beautiful cats, which had name tags and were sleeping during that time. There were house rules before entering the cafe: you should first wash your hands and take off your shoes or sandals. The place was a little small but very comfortable and bright-lit. The ambiance was also nice: once you enter, you would first see the counter and the variety of cupcakes and brownies that you could order, and also a wide array of cat-inspired merchandise. 

Rainbow Cat Cupcake

Moica Cupcake

You would automatically have a one-hour session with the cats, which is P100 and another P100 worth of food and drinks. 

Because there were still quite a lot of people who were playing with the cats during that time, my friend and I decided that we ordered first and chat for a little while. We ordered coffee and Moica and Rainbow Cat Cupcakes (P60 each). The cupcakes were moist on the inside with the right amount of sweetness. The coffee was not too strong. You could also add creamer, milk and sugar in your coffee.

A guy who always has interesting stories to tell, Brine told me about his life so far studying in UP Los Banos. He also talked about our favorite series "Big Bang Theory" and shared scientific ideas. I on the other hand, simply listened and we also exchanged stories.

After a while, we decided to play with the cats but unfortunately, most of them were still sleeping. Part of the house rules was to not stress the cats by carrying them especially when they sleep, and so we just sat with them and took pictures of them. Some of the cats were roaming around and even one of them climbed on top of one of the high stools.

Cat Cafe Manila is located at the 2nd Floor of 189 Maginhawa Street in Sikatuna Village. You can visit their Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/catcafemanila?fref=ts.

People who smack you in the head

My high school friends Gema and Kat

In total remorse for the last five months. I knew something was wrong with me because I didn't want to see any of my friends or professors. I just denied it. I didnt want to see their faces, talk to them nor text them when they asked me how I was doing. I was in paranoia, depression and early stage psychosis probably, and I felt so ashamed of my condition I didn't want to go outside our house. I just wanted to stay in the comforts of my bedroom, watch Eat Bulaga with my dad and eat and eat and eat.

The best friend: Gema

The can't-wait'togo-to-Japan friend: Kat

My teacher best friend: Brine

By the end of July something dawned on me: I have tons of friends, professors who never stopped supporting me and I felt no remorse when I hated them all. But they never left.

My elementary friends: Brine and Myvi

After I've decided that I will apply for a residency for the first semester, no one asked the "why" question. They simply hugged me tight and smacked me where the hell was I five months ago. I told them I needed to elevate my state of love life and so I went looking for a boyfriend. They laughed. We ate. We shared stories. They understood my condition. We gobbled our friend's molasses cookies. It was like a year of heaven for me.

College Friends: Amy, Mikee, Lakan, Lisette, Shaula, Mylene

I reunited with my elementary and high school friends. We ate the same food. I gave them letters and loom bands. They kissed and hugged me tight and fully supported my decision to take the residency. My friend Gema didn't stop talking and kept on asking for directions at UP. It was like nothing happened at all.

Sometimes it's all in our minds. We can never move on until we give ourselves a chance, unless we forgive ourselves. Never mind what the people will say. Friends will smack you in the head because you disappeared without their permission. They will slap you because you already have a love life while they don't. They will hug you until you can't breathe because they've missed you. They will kiss you because they've missed you, just as you missed them after all.

Share the love with Angel's Heart-shaped Pizza!

Angel's Heart-shaped Pizza

"Happiness is only real when shared."

I remember this quote from the movie Into the Wild shared to me by Ms. Josephine Bonsol as I celebrated the season of love with friends and my twin sister at Angel's Pizza Pasta Combo with their new Heart-shaped pizza.

As we indulged ourselves both in non-stop laughter and in Angel's cheesy burger double decker pizza (P647), a mouthwatering journey to 7th heaven of oozing mozarella cheese, beef, bacon and culinary cream between the two thin crusts we reminisced and laughed at our high school days and it has been one of my most memorable days thinking even though our college life is slowly changing us, we, especially my friends Gemma and Kim, have stayed the same--makulit, humble, funny and bubbly.

We also mused at each other's love life with Angel's innovative creation of heart-shaped pizza perfect for this season of love.

Chicken Parmigiana

We also ordered Angel's Breaded Chicken Bowls: Chicken Parmigiana (P95 with iced tea), perfectly baked chicken with oozing cheese and  pizza sauce and Chicken with Creamy Sauce (P95 with iced tea), chicken in rich cream and corn and carrots.

Chicken with Creamy Sauce

Chicken Aloha

My dad got a little envious as my old man is also crazy about pizza and so I availed their Family Chicken Aloha pizza (P470/12")--equally a bundle of joy of bbq chicken chunks, bacon, pineapple, green pepper, bbq sauce and mozzarella cheese--with Angel's VIP card, where you can avail any of the following upon placing your order: 

1. 20% discount on all pizza purchase;

2. FREE Family pizza for every Big Family pizza purchase; or

3. FREE Medium pizza for every Family pizza purchase

You can still avail Angel's Heart-shaped pizza (for Big Family Thin Crust Pizza only) until February 29 with friends and family that will truly make your Valentine's season complete.

Visit their website at www.angelspizza.com.ph and like their Facebook page at www.facebook.com/angelspizzapastacombo. 

I'm not a mime. I'm not them.

They act like mimes. They always agree because everybody does. They believe the same fallacy. They stick together, and they all get the same karma.


I began to imagine how high school life may be comparative to the life of both a schizophrenic and an idealistic dreamer-- with a magnified world of clashing emotions, overstated whims and overpowering influences. Here lies the awful puberty stage where mini cold wars exist and peer pressure takes its toll, adapting the quote, "One for all, all for one".

Somehow it has been very hard to be the ugly duckling, as everyone urges you to be mimes like them. With the disturbing evolution of the term "high school" to "political arena", everyone pushes you to study and stroll and eat and pee with your friends all the time. As if you're each other's oxygen tanks and you can't seriously breathe and survive without them.


But then I remembered Woody (Tom Hanks) in Toy Story 3. He gave up his friends. He gave up the strong relationship. He gave up the seemingly comfortable zone meant for toys like him to be played with forever. But he never gave up on Andy. He never gave up his belief, while the rest selfishly sought for their temporary havens.

I then realized it shouldn't take friends or the majority's universal belief to change what I believe in. Woody had his own. He knew where he was meant to be and cared less if he would be left alone.


Who are they anyway? Who are they to manipulate someone like a doll, saying he should join their group and believe anyone who's not like them is a stupid abnormal outcast. Somehow this may be an irrational notion in the BFF rule book, but then at the end of the day, who's still the mime?

The walls, the cellmate, and the chair

Part II

Worlds apart: same prison, different hellholes

True, we take a lot of things for granted, until we learn to look farther in the long run, and witness other people being deprived of the things we once thought everybody has.


1. Family, Friends, Foes

The father's tears: Lincoln behind bars with his son LJ

Maybe the second dumbest thing a villain can plan is to not have a family. It actually makes little sense when bad people say family will only be a distraction, an interference, a burden. From quite a number of movies I watched, I noticed family always serves as the best motivator and the only reason to commit the most unimaginable crime that is yet to be written in the Crime Library archives.


FAMILY: Law-abiding Citizen: After a father saw his wife and little girl raped and tortured to death, he seeks for "justice the system cannot obviously provide", and comes back for the worst revenge no one can believe to be possible: killing people with his own hands--even if he's behind bars.


John Q.: Not one father can accept he will bury his son long before his son buries him. As his son was diagnosed with cardiac arrest, he almost sold his house just to pay for the hospital bills after his insurance company won't pay for it. Getting a job and waiting for the monthly salary was not an option, and the last desperate resort came to John Q.'s mind: take a hospital hostage, until the apathetic doctors perform the surgery spelling both the loving father's and the son's life.


The same theme goes for Prison Break: Lincoln was all Michael had in the world, and the only family who stayed despite their "nature and nurture" differences. For the structural engineer, enduring the laser for his deceiving Sistine Chapel tattoos, getting his toes cut and fabricating another crime to get incarcerated for the second time instead were all simply "crosses to bear". As long as his brother escapes the electric chair he obviously did not deserve, Michael was always more than ready to suffer and accept the consequences.

The "papi" who never left: Sucre and Michael digging a hole for the break-in (series four)

FRIENDS: Measuring how far a friend would go also became one of the series' moral themes. While on the run, a lot of people Michael once thought  were "friends and allies" came and went even as fast as the speed of light. But amidst his efforts to "establish trust", two people remained: Fernando Sucre (Amaury Nolasco) and Alexander Mahone (William Fichtner).


This part also taught how friends should understand each other even without words. A lot of surprises shook the team in the third and fourth series when Plan A didn't go out so well, then Michael and Mahone would look at each other with the understanding of "Let's do plan B."

The backstabber: Don Self, extreme right (series four)

FOES: At most times our protagonists had no choice but to trust their original foes because a new set of villains is on the move. But the foe in this story is actually defined as those people too smart enough to impersonate as allies, then would stab you at the back after he got what he wanted from you.


In the end, those old foes even became part of Michael's "plan C's", and somehow offered the "luck" for the team when they needed it the most.


2. Freedom

Let's admit we look at it as more boring in real life than in meaning. Of course, it only gets boring when we don't want to get another dictionary to look for its definition other than "being liberated from our strict parents".


But for a bunch of paranoid fugitives, freedom was everything.


The team's hunger for liberty from being wrongfully convicted and the itch to come home were most seen in series one: the breaking out, and series four: the breaking in. A lot of strong temptations also clouded their minds in the long run (like when Sucre and Bellick were to stand guard and wait, and Bellick tempted Sucre to drive and escape from the team instead).


But the focus on closing the off-the-books deal and seeing official papers of emancipation never faded in Michael's "tumored" brain. At one point he condemned Lincoln, and even his girlfriend Sara about the latters' deal working with the Company in exhange of saving Michael's life. He was at the brink of death after being diagnosed with brain tumor, and the only way to save him was to bring him to special Company doctors.


Michael also taught me to look at the long-term consequences of one's actions, and to not linger and be contented much on the seemingly comforting achievements at present. Since series one, he only saw two things at the farthest end of the grim tunnel: freedom and family. All through out these two kept him going.


3. The art of being smarter

Michael scammed them all.


It must truly be an insulting, and probably the brightest plan to deceive your team: you tag them along at first, then eventually dump them to your traphole, because after all, other members of your team did not certainly deserve rightful freedom.


Adopting the practical and realistic principles of a communist mind, this situation actually highlights the one being smarter; the one who knows the plan. After all, if you're a mere soldier of the army, you would most likely stay either as the contractor, the bait, the additional burden, or the dumb ugly duckling desperately keeping up with Mother Goose.


It probably looked like convicts walking in a pitch black tunnel and they even had no idea what's waiting for them on the other side. But the cruelty of each one's survival was not much of a sympathy issue: it was mainly about trying to be smarter than everybody else to escape as far as the Pacific. And not even that, it was more about being the mastermind of the escape plan.


I remember my mentor Ms. Josephine Bonsol giving a lecture about being "parrots" and riding along the "bandwagon" of the social community. I've finally understood what she meant when she indirectly taught us about the consequences of always following our friends' whereabouts and scandals and routines, and idly wanting to stay as the "buyer" and not the "innovator".


For eight fugitives on the run, with husky but swift guards and dogs at their heels, they had no choice but to rely their trust to the structural engineer who started it all. Somehow it's a very dangerous thing to believe a man with a complicated and mysterious mind; it's like jumping into hell not knowing what's waiting for you below.


We may never know how worse the scenario would get when we continue to be mimes and parrots because we "think" it's the right thing to do. After all, there is no such term as the "right thing"; it only becomes right according to us and according to what the majority says about it.

MOVIE ON STORM: Gossip, lies and info broadcast on wildfire at Easy A

Sometimes helping others won't help yourself in return.

We must admit it: high school is more likely to be the most scandalous stage we can even get through in life. Rewriting our once-clean reputations, I observed, would abruptly evolve into proudly having a bunch of girlfriends/boyfriends, fans clubs and a flock of BFFs only to be well-known for its constant fall down of members because of sickening squabbles.

Others may say high school is their death sentence: zero social network, struggles in studies, occasional black eyes, unwanted visitors after classes and total isolation might be their nightmares.

They say sometimes in life, helping others is the surest way to help yourself. But for Olive Penderghast the Easy A, it was a complete irony.

THE LIE: I JUST LOST MY V-CARD

Olive is an anonymous high school student unfortunately tortured by the big fat lie she made up of losing her virginity (yep, that's the V-card) to a completely nonexistent college freshman, eventually leading her to be famous for being a "super slut".

The lies pile up after she told it to her best friend Rhiannon, then heard by a Jesus-freak schoolmate and the gossip suddenly spread like wildfire. And we must all agree her peer pressure towards her so-called BFF started it all.

To some extent, peers and "close friends" aren't really true comrades. I've seen girl and boy orgs in my class crumble into 2-5 members all because of secrets, pride, jealousy and senseless misunderstandings. I've also been taught to not take real social networking seriously, because these faces I see today will all be gone in the end, and won't really help me mold my future. It's all because the truth is, true friends should not really be at our side forever.

Olive and her BFF Rhiannon: "I worry about how information circulates in our school."

THE GOSSIP: FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT

I must say gossip is right next to love in making the world go round. Say your secret in the lavatory and the rest of the school disgustingly stares at you the moment you open the door. As Olive had described it, her "terminological inexactitude" traveled at an "accelerated velocity", the common knowledge about gossip we already shouldn't be surprised about.

And it's actually true; we even believe in and harvest gossips more rather than find out and analyze if our national hero was really gay or not.

I remembered my Filipino teacher said, "Ang naniniwala sa sabi-sabi ay walang bait sa sarili." Believing in gossip, we were taught, is a crime against ourselves, because we would actually believe in lies we even don't want to evaluate or question.

THE INFO BROADCAST: EVOLUTION OF COMMUNICATION

What's worse about gossip, is it has an element of "dagdag-bawas". And this is the truth about communication: Ms. Gossip Girl rumors about her BFF having a new boyfriend, eavesdropping ears pile up, and the last person in line receives the wrong tweet that the BFF is already pregnant.

The warped information dissemination has evolved long before the Tabon Man era. Primitive people drew figures and symbols on walls and poked messages in bottles to communicate with each other, but then nobody really knew if they understood each other.

For Olive's already-indecent status, her identifier of losing her V-card outrageously evolved into spanking a classmate because of a nasty comment, and being a "dirty skank".

Olive's redemption: "Log on to www.FreeOlive.com to confirm if I'm really a super slut or not"

Of course, in the end, she was able to get out of her hellhole and haunted her downtrodden "clients" online, who measly paid her automotive GC's just so to tell the whole school she did "things" with them. Until then, learning from this movie, LET'S NOT SAY WE DID SOMETHING WE REALLY DIDN'T.