Queue Tips: Eden is Cheese

When I was growing up in the Philippines, Eden was cheese.  Not sure why they named it that.  I remember picking at it sometimes.  You weren't supposed to eat it without bread.  And you kind of saved it for special occasions.  It probably was not cheap.  Do they still make it?

In any case, I saw "East of Eden" recently.  It stars James Dean.  I don't think I've seen much of his films.  A lot of his acting in here involves hugging trees and playing with their leaves and groping walls for some reason.  And then he runs with his arms flailing about.  And being overly dramatic like a hormonal teenager even though he looked middle aged at this point.

This film was made in 1955, and I guess that's just how those movies were.  But I just couldn't get into the melodrama.  I prefer a little more subtlety, but I guess that's just how acting was back then.  At the same time, I also can't stand some of the acting nowadays.  

Apparently, east of Eden is where Cain went to live after he killed his brother Abel in the Bible.  This movie does have two brothers having a rivalry, but one doesn't kill the other.  Unless I missed it somehow.    Instead it involves a girl.  One has a girlfriend and the other I guess likes her, too.  I have two brothers, and I can't picture myself liking any of their girlfriends.

And then apparently they don't know who their mother is or something.  But then James Dean finds out who she is.  And he follows her around and for some reason instead of talking to her, he throws stones at her house.  And then later on when they actually finally meet, it's like they just basically acknowledge each other as mother and son.  Like after making a big whole deal about it, suddenly it's just like nothing.  Like taken for granted.

Kinda reminds me of stuff I went through as a kid.  There was a lot of drama with my mom and dad, and they eventually divorced around the time I was in college.  And drama with the in-laws.  My mom used to trade letters with my aunt.  That was probably actually the main reason why she kept picking up my grandma from her house.  So that she could drop off her letter when she got there.  And then when she dropped off my grandma back there, she would come back with a letter from my aunt in response.  At one time I got a glimpse of it but either didn't get a chance to fully read it or just didn't want to.  My mom kept it somewhere else after, and I never found it again.  Or never looked for it.

Anyways, many years later, with me already an adult, everybody kinds of makes up with each other.  And everything is nice nice.  Meanwhile, I was in the middle of all this as a child, and even now no one has acknowledged that.  And I never got close with my aunt or my uncle or my cousin after, and with me spending all those lonely days and nights in a tiny apartment and all those boring summers with nowhere to go and nothing do.  I mean, it would have been nice to be around some family.  But let's just forget all that now that we are all cool with each other again.

Queue Tips: The Lonely Dead

When I was working at the baseball network a few years ago, there was this play where someone from right field made a throw or something and they got somebody out at the plate.  So the producers wrote in their copy something like, "They got him dead to rights!"  And they had this lady hosting the highlights show, and she just would not say the line.  Instead she would say something like, "Dead at home plate" or something like that.  And the producers kept asking her to do the line again and again, every time she wouldn't say it.  I feel like she just did not get the expression.  They were frustrated with her, but they just let it go.  She never did say it correctly.  We all just wanted to go home in the end.  I keep thinking of that when I hear the word "dead".

A few years ago, I started watching "Dead To Me".  I don't remember why I checked it out.  I don't think I even knew Christina Applegate was in it.  I think it was a pleasant surprise when I saw her.  And then that girl from "Freaks and Geeks", too, who was also in some episodes of "Mad Men".

It was very interesting at first.  I really liked the premise.  It was about a widow dealing with the death of her husband, and she kind of had this attitude about grieving, like it was beyond her.  And then she meets this woman who befriends her.  She has lost somebody also, and they bond and overcome their loneliness together.  And then it turns out the protagonist had two kids.  As a father, it was interesting to me to see what kind of a hole his death would have left on that family.  The show started out great.

And then it kind of went downhill from there.  Spoiler alert.  There turned out to be a good twist right away, as the woman friend turned out to be the killer of the husband.  So then you're kinda hooked into wondering how they could possibly survive the friendship once the truth comes out.  And then the truth comes out and it just kind of becomes ridiculous at that point.  That's sort of what I don't like about watching a series, because then you are now invested and want to know how it turns out.

So how they resolved it is they then made the main character kill the friend's husband also.  So now they're even.  And it just kinda gets sillier from there.  They end up befriending the detectives working on the case, and they end up getting away with it because of that.  And it turns out the friend's husband had a twin brother.  Dun dun dun!  And the friend also helps to bury her husband.  It just turned out to be a soap opera at that point.

Somewhere along the line, they just forgot about the original dead guy.  Who he was to their kids and to the main character was just ignored.  The focus on the grieving disappeared, and it was just about how the living moved on with their lives and got away with their crimes.  Of course, they made you feel bad about the dead so that you kind of root for these women.  The performances were great though.  Christina and the "Freaks and Geeks" girl were amazing.  And Christina's mom from "Married... With Children" also appeared in some episodes, and she was good, too.  That was the redeeming factor.  But the writing overall was not so good.

Sports Entertainment

My eldest brother visited us in December of 1991 during Christmas break.  He left us on New Year's Eve and celebrated the new year on the plane.  He said that it was mostly empty.  I'm not sure if that would be possible now with how they run the air lines these days.  He turned eighteen the following month, which complicated my mother's ability to be able to petition her.  Basically, she couldn't.  

We later learned from some immigration lawyer that he should have just stayed in America while they worked on converting his tourist visa.  Or something like that.  I only overheard these things as a twelve year.  Nobody really took their time to explain things to me.  Even when it came to members of my own immediate family.  And this was one I would never see again for decades later.

Meanwhile, my parents worked on getting my second oldest brother, the middle child, to the United States.  My mom petitioned him, and by summer of 1993, he did arrive to live with us.

I did not have a lot of friends at this time.  No one close, anyway.  I had classmates who I associated with, but never really spend time with anyone outside of school.  So I thought it would be nice to have my brother come live with us and actually stay and not just visit.

Now, this brother and I were never really that close.  But still, he was my brother.  I thought I would finally have an ally in this foreign land.  At first, especially during summer, we kind of got along.  He would even sometimes put his arms around me, which I did really like, but was still kind of odd to me, especially after a couple of years of not seeing him.

But things kind of changed once school started.  I was in the eighth grade at this point.  I transferred from Catholic school to public school to save money.  He was a freshman in college, and my mom could only afford community college.  Now I don't know if he struggled with adjusting to life in the States, but he never let on about any troubles.  He did continue to hang on to a lot of his ways in the Philippines that he thought was really cool, and I just remember constantly thinking, no one knows you and no one cares about that here.

We just kind of drifted apart.  We had a few fights.  One of the main ones was on a Saturday afternoon.  For weeks, we had this routine of watching the same lineup every weekend.  I can't recall specifically now, but it was "The A-Team", "Three's Company", "Mr. Belvedere" and maybe a couple other shows and not necessarily in that order.  Anyway, that one day just before one of the shows was about to begin, he just decided he wanted to watch something else.  And it took me by surprise.  I had been looking forward to the show, especially since they would always show commercials.  I was pretty much shocked and the sudden change in behavior.  And we argued loudly about it.

We only had one TV at this point.  The other one was broken.  Also, the VCR was broken.  My brother thought he knew how to fix things, when he actually didn't.  He probably meant well, but one of his ways was banging on the side of the machine.  And then if that didn't work, bang it harder.  My mom wasn't happy with that, and he was upset with getting the blame for breaking things.

I got sick at some point in the springtime.  I was out of school for a few days, maybe even for a whole week or more.  Actually, it is also possible that I was sick around spring break, and that was why I was out of school so much.  I mentioned my brother previously because during these times when I was sick, I can't remember ever interacting with him.  He had a little room with a curtain, and he spent most of his time there by himself.

At some point, we got a membership at this video store around the corner.  They happened to have WWF video tapes and for a while I was renting different WrestleManias and Summer Slams and Royal Rumbles.  By the time I was sick, I was on the Survivor Series series.  When I got a little better that I could get out of bed but still not go to school, I would go to the video store and return the tapes and rent other ones.

Nowadays, when I'm just kind of sick but not really sick, well enough to walk but a little groggy, my nose a little stuffy, it makes me feel like watching the Survivor Series.

Sports

In the winter of 1991, my mom petitioned my eldest brother and he stayed with us for a couple of weeks.  He was seventeen, and the idea was that he should come to America while he was a minor.  We didn't know much about immigration law, but we somebody suggested that we should establish that he has come to the States and stayed with us before turning eighteen.  Something like that.  We turned out to be wrong because things became difficult once he became an adult.

Somehow somebody decided that it was more important for him to continue college in the Philippines.  He came to us during Christmas break in December.  We spent a lot of that time going to different friends and relatives.  It was kind of fun actually.  It seemed like we were at a different Christmas party every few days.  It was my first Christmas in America, and I thought it would be like that every year.  It wasn't.

Of course, we had to show my brother the sights in New York City.  We went to Times Square.  I'm not sure if this is a memory or imagined or if it was when my brother was there, but I remember us parking our car on Broadway in the middle of all that traffic and crowd and having to pee and going on the side of the car with the door covering the view.  Again, I'm not sure if that's a real memory though.

I went up for my first and only time to the top of the World Trade Center.  It was pretty cool.  I remember going up in a very huge elevator, like freight size.  I don't remember exactly if we went to the Statue of Liberty, but I'm inclined to think we did go there, as well as Ellis Island.

At home one night, NBA on NBC was on.  I remember it was the Bulls vs. Trailblazers.  It never occurred to me to watch sports in those days.  One Sunday I was channel surfing and I saw the New York Giants game on CBS, and I was like, meh.  It was the same for baseball, and car racing and golf and other stuff.  I definitely do not recall ever seeing a hockey game or even a commercial for it on local TV in those days.

I think it was a Saturday night, and I was probably expecting to see "Perfect Strangers" or some other sitcom on ABC or something.  But my brother wanted to watch Michael Jordan.  I don't think he had ever seen a live game on broadcast TV before.  So he was pretty excited about it.  I had grown accustomed to my shows, but I actually liked and admired my eldest brother a lot, and I was happy to let him watch.  I don't think I even thought about recording my shows.  I was just glad to share the experience with him.

I can't remember if they were the home or away team, but I believe the Bulls may have been playing in Portland.  I would feel confident in thinking that Chicago probably won that game.  I can't remember what else my brother and I watched on TV during his brief stay with us.  After he left, I continued to watch basketball whenever the Bulls were on, which was rare because we didn't have cable.

In the springtime though, with the NBA playoffs happening, I did get to see the Bulls a lot.  It was fun watching the team and getting invested into it.  I did not care for the Knicks or the Nets, nor did I know much about any of the other teams.  I wasn't even aware of the existence of the Phoenix Suns.  I thought the name was weird.  How many suns are there?  Isn't there only one sun? 

In the mornings at school, my classmates and I would talk about the game from the previous night.  I drew the Bulls logo on my notebooks a lot.  I got very good at it.  It was great for me because it was something I could talk about with my classmates.  And the Bulls did eventually win the championship.  I'm not sure what we talked about after that.

The Rentals

When I first moved to America, my mom and I lived with my aunt and her family in Queens.  This aunt was not my mom's sister.  They were in-laws.  After just a few months, we wore out our welcome and moved to Jersey City around December.

In the following summer, my grandmother came to the States to visit my aunt.  My mom had a car at this point, and on the weekends, she would drive to Queens to pick her up and she would stay with us for the weekend.  I was glad to see my grandma.  We were never close in the Philippines, but I did miss her and it was nice to see a familiar face again.

I was curious though of why she would want to be with us.  That is, why would she want to spend her time in a one bedroom apartment.  We didn't even go anywhere.

My mom was kind to her.  One of the things she did for my grandma was help her with her bath.  My grandma liked having her back scrubbed, and my mom did that for her.  My mom made it seem like my aunt was not willing to do that.  And honestly, I'm not sure if my mom did all that just to make herself seem like the better person.

We didn't have cable, and The Filipino Channel definitely did not exist back then.  I'm not sure if my grandma asked or if it was just my mom's idea, but we found this Filipino video store across the street from the Philippine Bread House, which we sometimes would go to.  Or, it's possible we went there for bread and noticed the video store.  In any case, we signed up for a membership and rented videos.

Hm.  Actually, I'm not sure if they already had Filipino movies back then.  Because I'm trying to remember what Filipino movies we watched with my grandma, and I can't actually recall.  But I know the place eventually did turn into a Filipino owned store by the time I was in high school.

One of the movies I picked was "The Naked Gun 2 1/2".  Or was it 33 1/3?  I'm not sure, but it was one of them.  I also picked "Problem Child 2", and I remember watching that movie with my grandma.  I'm not sure if my mom watched with us.  I remember we closed the curtain and the sunlight would still seep through and give the room a yellowish tint.  I remember liking the movie, and I'm sure I laughed a lot.  I can't recall specifically if my grandma laughed, too, but she never complained.

I have about 25 cousins on both sides of my family.  No lie.  So when I was growing up in the Philippines, I didn't have much time alone with my grandma.  It was kinda nice to spend time with just me and her in America.  I was twelve years old.  She always had this reputation of being stern and mean, but at that time, she was nice to me.  I had gained some weight at that time and sometimes I would lie down down on the floor and suck my stomach in and show her and tell her I was skinny.  She would just matter-of-factly say, "You're sucking your stomach in".  We never had any big jokes or anything, and we were never huggy-huggy or lovey dovey, but it was still nice.

She went back to the Philippines at the end of the summer.  She didn't like winters in America.  I remember she was like a superstar whenever she would come back.  She would have goodies from the States and my cousins and I couldn't wait to see what she brought.  

Anyways, I never saw her again after that.  We didn't even talk on the phone and definitely did not write letters.  She died a few years later.

Video Cassette Recorder

When we were living in Queens, I think I only went to work once with my mom.  It was pretty far, in Brooklyn, and we had to take a couple of busses and then the subway.  I went on a Saturday before school started.

When we moved to Jersey City, her work was just as far, or actually maybe even farther.  And I can't recall ever going back to work with her.  One time though, I think in the summer, I think I did go with her but not to her work.  She had met up with either old friends or relatives, and they lived close to where she worked.

I can't always tell about the Filipino adults we were acquainted with when I was growing up whether we were related because we have this custom of calling every adult as Aunt or Uncle.  But my mom was kind of surprised to find Uncle Roi in the States.  She apparently had not known where he and his wife were living.

I didn't go to camps in the summer.  We weren't even aware of what camps were available in the city, or how much they cost.  And we definitely could not afford to go away to vacations.  So somehow, my mom had this idea that I could spend some time with my uncle.  I believe I was to go to their apartment and he was to teach me how to draw or something.

So one day I went there.  I'm not sure why he was home, whether he was off for the whole summer or he had the day off or worked night shifts, but I was under the impression that he spent the days, at least in the summer, in their apartment.  His wife wasn't home so I assume she herself was working.  And my mom left me there for the day, as she went off to work.

We kind of had a little chat at first, and then he asked if I wanted to watch TV.  I think he did give me some paper and pens, but I just basically sat there all day watching.  I remember getting a glimpse of "Mystery Science Theatre" before changing channels.  They had cable and had HBO.  

We actually didn't end up doing any art or drawing.  I ended up sitting there by myself in the living room the whole time while he disappeared elsewhere.  He didn't do anything bad to me or anything.  On the contrary, he was more disinterested if anything.  In retrospect, I feel like it was my mom kind of inviting herself or myself into their lives.

His wife seemed even more disinterested than my uncle.  They were both nice enough, but especially for my aunt, she seemed to have a bit of an air that they were above us.  Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like she wanted nothing to do with us, and if not for the fact that they had known each other in the Philippines, they may not have entertained us at all.

In any case, my uncle had a bunch of tapes of movies he had recorded off HBO.  He had labeled them all neatly and displayed them by the TV stand.  He either offered to lend us some tapes or my mom simply asked to borrow them.  We did end up taking one or two home.  One of them was "Batman", if I remember correctly.

Now, if you didn't know how VHS tapes work, there's a little tab that you are supposed to pop off in order to protect it from recording.  And if you wanted to record over the tape again, you would simply put tape over the hole where the tab used to be.  So on one of those tapes, my uncle never popped the tab off.  At some point, I mistakenly pressed the record button on the remote control.  The VCR stopped playing the movie, and it immediately showed whatever channel it was tuned into and began recording it.  I quickly pressed the stop button, but of course, there is that one or two seconds of disruption over the movie now.

I think this may have been at my friend Jackson's house.  I think I wanted to show him "Batman" and brought over the tape there.  Either that or I wanted to just watch or finish it and so I took it with me.  

I felt bad about that mistake.  I felt guilty about it for a long time, but I never said anything.  Later on, my mom returned the tape, and I hoped my uncle would never find out.  They never did say anything about it.  I would hope if they did see it, they simply looked up when the movie was showing again and taped it again.

I didn't see much of my uncle and his wife after that.  I'm not sure if it was related to the tape.  But they ended up moving across the country to Seattle or something.  And they never told us or anyone.  When we did find out, I believe my mom was still able to contact them by phone or something.  But I never did see them again.

Video Home System

I didn't have cable growing up, so I didn't have much choice of what to watch on TV.  However, I just realized I actually did have options of what to watch.  Mainly, these were video rentals.

My mom and I usually would walk a few blocks to go grocery shopping to this store called C-Town.  I believe one time we walked past this video store by Vroom Street.  It is no longer there.  But we went in there and got a membership.  I can't remember which videos my mom and I first rented.  And then for the rest of the summer, it was just me walking over there to return and rent VHS tapes.

One of the movies I remember renting was "Only the Lonely", starring John Candy.  And I think there was also "Mr. Saturday Night", starring Billy Crystal.  I can't recall much of the other movies I rented though.

My mom also bought some VHS cassettes, mostly the cheap ones at C.H. Martin.  One of them was "Topaz", which she told me as a good movie by a good director.  I can't remember watching it with her, but afterwards I remember seeing the tape in its case all the time but I never got interested in popping it in no matter how bored I was sitting at home alone.

At some point, my mom signed up with Columbia House or something.  We used to see their commercials all the time on TV.  I can't remember all the movies she bought at first because I think you can get like ten for one cent or something like that initially.  And I don't remember if it came from the club or it was bought at a store, but we also had "A Man Called Horse".  She was watching it one morning, but I didn't stay in the living room with her.  I think I went into the bedroom to watch something else.  I did walk by once in a while and I remember the scene where they were hanging the guy through a rope under the skin of his chest.  I didn't really feel like watching the rest of it.  I did check it out though many years later, and I thought the movie was all right.  

We also had a copy of "On Golden Pond".  It was another title that I kept seeing near the VCR but I never popped into the cassette player.  It just seemed like more of a grown up movie and not for me.

Another movie what we had was "Basic Instinct".  I never watched it with my mom, thank goodness.  I think I already knew it was something I wouldn't want to watch with her.  But when I was home alone by myself though, I did watch it a few times.  I was twelve years old.  It was definitely more of a grown up movie and not for me.

I can't believe I can't remember if I had asked her to buy me movies also through the club.  I'm fairly certain I did though.  I just can't remember the exact titles.  I was really into comedies back then so it must have been something funny.