u/Specific-Month-1755

Just for fun but serious here because how can you be in this country, but I heard both of these today.

So I heard both of these today.

'Sometimes I'm always angry."

And then the question, which could be a whole post all by itself was,

So my beautiful girlfriend is going in a beauty contest and which she has done before, and during drink coffee this morning she asked me, hey, what can I do for talent?

Ummmmmmmmmmm.

Well, my love I know your talents but it's not really for the stage.

We've done karaoke so it's definitely not singing.

No cooking.

Not cleaning.

Not . . . .

I'm thinking she's going to have to wing it.

Okay. You may or may not know that I was a Hindi movie star, I was in a movie when I was in India and I've been searching for that movie ever since. 

This was in the '90s basically back before there was any internet so at the start my search mainly consisted of hitting Bollywood movie rental places in Vancouver when I was there.  I had the working title but I didn't know the official title. The working title was Lakshmi Swami.

Later with the advent of the internet I could find my co-stars, Jeannie Michaels and Gary Richardson, but there was no link to the movie. 

So the other day I was chatting about my travels to India and how I hated it, but as usual it turned to the fact that I was a Hindi movie star.

So I tried AI.  Gpt couldn't even find my co-stars, so fuck that. 

Claude, however, found them but we couldn't find his credit.  

I added a detail about the scene I was in, a religious conference set in Chicago. As luck would have it, there was an actual religious conference set in Chicago about 100 years ago.  

And I found my movie. Luckily it was based upon a true story.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Bxx1TUe3\_mQ

2:29:01 

2:36:16

And my mentor at 2 hour 30 minutes 29 seconds.  Gary Richardson.

QED after 29 years.

Thanks Claude.

So I've been here for almost 2 years and it's been really hard to find a decent girlfriend.  I never had any problems in any other countries except for here. Yeah there's lots of girls and if you want to bang them then it's easier than shooting fish in a barrel, but I'm looking for a decent girl for a serious relationship. 

So finally I met an absolutely wonderful woman.  She could hold a conversation, make a conversation, lead a conversation, follow a conversation and pretty much juggle anything in a conversation unlike the other locals. 

She comes from province but lives elsewhere and I live in the province so that's kind of what I want. Someone knows what the slower life is like.  We arranged the meet and she came over for the weekend.  We'd actually chatted a while and I had a quick coffee with her when I was passing through Cebu City, so her visit was not exactly out of the blue.

We barely looked at our phones during the whole weekend, basically just to show our pictures and look at Google maps and explain where we've been and where we're going. It was amazingly incredible.  I'm a decent cook but she deserves more so we ate elsewhere.  And this is where I discovered another thing. She knows how to use the knife, she's familiar with foods of the world, she can cook but not just rice and  adobo like so many others.  She's international.  She knows what eggs Benedict is.  I don't think she ate rice the whole weekend and she definitely didn't eat it with her hands  if she did, I would remember that.

We're talking about Thailand because we both have been there and that's where they're going for her mom's birthday.  She turned to me and said, Chun rakkoon, and I added makmak. 

Her English was polished, not like the normal English here where people are mismatching personal pronouns and don't know how to do past present or future tense.  There wasn't the usual Filipino pidgin English with her.

She never littered in my yard as we're sitting watching the sunset like others casually have.  

We talked about the future. How she wants to work and save money so she can buy or build a house looking on the ocean and make a business. She had a good idea for the business, it's not the usual Siri Siri but an idea she saw at tourist spot while on her travels.  I would definitely be a customer. 

It's almost like she was culturally a Westerner not a Filipina, yet she grew up in the Philippines.  Parents weren't rich either, I met her mother on video chat and the background showed a pretty much normal Filipino house, block walls and no ceiling, just open to the roof.  Apparently her dad worked outside of the Philippines and instead of putting money into a house, he put money into educations.

And here's the plot twist for you and the sad part for me.

She is currently visiting the Philippines, on vacation for her mom's birthday where the family are going to take her mom to Thailand.  Both her and her older sister do not work in the Philippines, they work in Europe.   She has assimilated the Western values of long-term thinking, strong work ethic, respect for the environment and living in a rules-based society. And what she kept is the family part and all the good stuff about the Philippines. She is truly the best of both worlds. All in a 50 kilo package.

 

And the sad part for me is soon she will be leaving to go back to work, but she says that she visits every 6 months or so.

And all of this took me back to all of the Filipinos I've met back home, either when I was a kid or as co-workers, but they're just not the same as they are here.  I remember I was on a flight to Costa Rica that got diverted because of weather and we had to land in Nicaragua and there were a bunch of Filipino/as  that were supposed to start their shift on a cruise ship docked in  Puntarenas, Costa Rica.  And I got to hang around with them for those 8 hours or so until the weather lifted and we could take off and go back to San José and they were the ones that made me really want to come here.

Why aren't those people here?

And I'm not looking for answers, its just sad.