(Before all else, I need to take the time to rejoice on M2M getting back together again.)
Happiness is TFC that shows Filipino movies that are so cringey, so cheesy, I can barely look away. My Ex and Whys plays from start to finish, and I am exceedingly invested on something I’ve never heard of before, while we spend an entire Saturday hanging out at Gio’s aunt’s new restaurant franchise in Artesia. The hour is after lunch, slow and sleepy, the TV is up behind the counter. Everyone’s hands are busy drying banana leaves for the bibingka, else packaging atchara, but my eyes are glued on the screen.
There are so many words untranslatable in English. A notable one is kilig: a spine-tingling, mushy, goosebumpy feeling brought on by the witness or experience of romance, almost inevitably followed by a shrill, pleased shriek similar to that of a high school girl’s. Movies like this are the epitome of kilig, long before a permed Claudine endearingly likened Rico to a gum chewed for two days.
Persian cuisine for Sunday lunch, and happiness is the wrought-iron arched gate to Raffi’s Place, ravaged by crawling, flowering vines. Enter from the back alley, the one near the restrooms, and not from the street. The seating is open-air, a semi-covered courtyard with a little garden in the center, and on this Sunday lunchtime Middle Eastern families flock in by the hordes. A colorful mix of languages foreign to my ears clouds the air. Happiness is yellow basmati rice that’s always too much for the table. Skewered, grilled meat, sleeping under a lavash blanket. The mahi-mahi that surprises you.
At a bookstore that used to be a bank I find a slightly-battered Ballantine paperback of my favorite Holmes story, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Odd how taste changes overtime. I used to want the most pristine and newest copies, trade paperback only, and none of those movie tie-in editions. Now I still hate movie tie-ins, still largely ignore hardcovers, but also now treasure vintage mass-market paperbacks, babied inside protective plastic covers. The first two books I’ve ever owned were both gifts and mass-markets: a romance novel aptly and cloyingly titled Love Happens that I have since lost, and A Walk to Remember because I had been “too young” to watch the film at the time so my dad gave me the book instead — sadly in the movie tie-in edition. But I keep it; it’s still in my bookcase even though we don’t talk anymore. I keep this one movie tie-in eyesore only slightly begrudgingly, his dedication inside the front cover written in his curly, funhouse penmanship.
If happiness is an ice cream flavor it would be Jeni’s coffee with cream and sugar, served on a sugar cone. There are things I go back to L.A. for, and one of them is this. I know a pint can be bought online and delivered, I know they have shops across the United States, but there are also things one just does one way and never another. I specifically go to their Larchmont branch with my youngest sister. Like people in the know we head straight to the back patio, its existence inconspicuous, and with cones in hand we take shelter from the dry California heat under patio umbrellas, sitting on metal seashell chairs painted in a variety of pleasing pastel colors.
For the hour it takes to drive from Larchmont to Costa Mesa on a Sunday evening at the tail end of September, we play a few songs from Shades of Purple without knowing about their reunion yet. We play it only because when you’re stuck in traffic, old guilty-pleasure songs from an age ago will give you endorphins or at least take your mind off things a little. We sing to lyrics we know a little too well, corny the only way pop songs can be and yet has a hold on an entire era of a life. My sister is behind the wheel, adept in dealing with that unique breed of aggression found in L.A. drivers, having lived here for the last how many years. In the passenger seat I squint against the evening sun, glaring salmon and gold on a painfully cloudless indigo sky, a seldom sighting for someone from the Pacific Northwest. The songs switch to Ronan Keating, Stephen Speaks, Britney.
We’re not late to dinner: dim sum at a place everyone is talking about. Happiness is revelling in my unoriginality of loving chow mein, siomai drowned in chili oil and soy sauce, and steamed pork buns that remind me of siopao only these ones are fresh and hot and not mass-produced from Chow King. Bellies full again, outside the night is dark and cool and no smog, and this one is contentment. My in-laws are caught up in conversation with friends they happen to run into, on the side of a curb outside two restaurants they each happen to have dinner in.
Inching through Monday morning traffic while the destination is downtown L.A. is the last thing anyone wants to be doing at any point in time, but we do it anyway when there’s a promise of spicy breaded pork chops over fried rice and eggs with classic diner coffee, in a restaurant that used to be in a different building around the corner. Even as we survive that rush-hour traffic, it’s still an obstacle course of tramps, hopeless one-way streets, barfed-at corners from the weekend before, and expensive parking rates before we actually get there. But happiness is in bright yellow tables and the painted sign above the counter says Best spicy pork chops!
When California Pizza Kitchen used to have several branches in Seattle, my husband and I went there on birthdays and every other weekend and got fat from their butter cake: a golden decadence topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream the size of a tennis ball. They closed down all their Seattle locations some years ago (likely for the good of our health), but there’s a branch near our boarding gate at LAX and we order the cake to share, with our second coffee of the day, strong and black to offset the sinful sweetness. Like with In-N-Out we might get too old for this soon so might as well have it while we can.
I find out about M2M, a return flight and two weeks later. They’d posted the announcement on an Easter egg perfection: September twenty-second, Sunday, twenty-five after nine as immortalized in their song, “The Day You Went Away.” The cooler part of me that worships Fall Out Boy and a flame-haired Hayley Williams and any band that has contributed to a Punk Goes Pop is looking at me with a shocked disbelief for comprehending that Easter egg. But M2M, along with the love-to-say-I-hate-but-don’t pop music of the late 90’s and early 00’s, cement that brief cusp of preteen age, back when our CDs came from shady music stores inside Aliw Complex and had a very strong likelihood of having been pirated. An age where first crushes and menarche and fashion magazines were just being discovered, when song lyrics were just beginning to make sense. It’s a very significant age to be symbolized by a genre. The music, though digitalized now and streaming under some overpriced premium plan, acts like a familiar scent that evokes a nostalgic response, a sensory reincarnation of something special, something I’ll never have again. I know — I guess I really, really know.
TINY WORRIES 