My 25th Weekend Birthday Bash

My Orange Cheesecake birthday cake with 25 candles! Thanks Petunias! Photo c/o Francis

I celebrated my 24^th birthday with my family at Shangri-la’s HEAT. The price I had to pay the rest of the year was the price my parents had to pay for our meal that night, really really expensive. On my 25th, to celebrate the year ahead and compensate as reward for the terrible year I had to endure, I made it a point to really maximize the long weekend I was granted in the best way I know how, eat. In a span of four days I managed to eat in seven different places (Sa Kanto, The Village Tavern, The Cake Club, of course my lovely CBTL, Mercato, Slice, and Yakimix respectively.) And just so you know, we paid a lot more for a single meal at Heat than the seven places I ate in last week. This year, I’m celebrating my silver year, my quarter-life, my year of recuperation, and my incubation period before finally deciding where in life I should be. I've made my choice, but right now it’s still in the maturing process, thus I’m silent about the matter. The fact that if I live long enough, I will be thirty soon, and the pressure to make it in life is a struggle for someone under the process of experiencing a self-assessed quarter-life-crisis. Yes, I’m still working on that article.

It’s been over a week since my birthday, in fact it is almost two weeks...but that doesn’t matter since I still feel like I’m twenty-three, mentally. Last year, was my “Terrible Twenty-Four” and I shall officially call that my dark age as not only did I get a lot of sunburn last year, it was also the age of lot of downs and downer to the downestest days of my conscious memory. In fact given my mood through the chart illustration, there’s a lot of negative and zero moments that I now thank my bad memory because I happen to have forgotten 90% of them. Last year was the year I made a lot of ground-breaking falls and I can still feel the pain to this day…just not as bad though.  There were a lot of lessons to be learned that year, mostly centring on humility and acceptance of unfortunate circumstances. I’m better now, one important matter I’ve come to realize in life due to being beaten by it is that I’m learning to live in discontent, frustrations, and a-not-so-happy life. I thought I was falling into a depression, but I suppose I can call it temporary anxiety as the worst days mostly occur around that time of the month. It’s when I get to blame my hormones and want to shut myself off from the world. It was the time when I felt like fate was digging my grave. Now, I’m slowly piling back up the dirt it dug, but very very slowly. Hmmmmm…this is a really dark entry and actually sounds more depressing than the actual situation. Okay, I’ll stop the drama because this is starting to get sad. Besides, did I mention I’m better now?

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand now I’m back to a fresh start at twenty-five and so far I’m doing my fair share of better days. Yey! I survived being 24! Now comes the reality of aging…

My birthday gifts.

I started my long birthday weekend by planning to go out with four different set of friends and just spending time to be with them, to catch up and eat. That move made wonders to mend a beaten soul, hence the last line of my mood chart ended in an all-time high, a notch higher than the last year’s high. The eve of my birthday I spent it watching the silent film of Keisatsukan by Tomu Uchida at Shang’s 7^th International Silent Film Festival. After the film we headed for Café 1771 but it was late so we went to Borough instead but it was packed at usual, so we settled with its neighbor Sa Kanto. We were starving, plus it was Mar’s treat so it was a good meal, except for the tough native chicken meat. We also dropped by CBTL to purchase my brother's birthday gift for me, a can of their delicious Anniversary Blend. Yummeh! The chocolate scones and chocolate salt-caramel brownies were baked by Mar.

On the day of my birthday, after the mass at San Antonio Parish at Forbes we searched for a lunch place…I was craving for some fish and chips and The Village Tavern had them so I opted for the fish and pasta for that tradition of having to eat something long on one’s birthday. The meal is what I shall call expensive-mediocrity. I had the sudden urge to wash my mouth off with cake, so The Cake Club next door it was. I liked the café on its first few months better…now their Ispahan doesn’t look as beautiful as before. But I do love the flavour combination of rose and lychee plus fresh raspberries. Then after lunch I met with my two highschool barkada at CBTL so that cup of Chai Latte made up for the bad lunch. It was a real fun treat to catch up with them after not seeing them for over six months!

Fish Fillet and Pasta at The Village Tavern

Ispahan from The Cake Club

The next part of my birthday bash was meeting up with my college friends where we ate dinner at Midnight Mercato. I ate Juana Bowl’s rib eye steak, medium-done, and I’m so in love with it that it’s gonna be my staple rice-meal at Mercato besides Auntie May’s Angus tapa from now on.  Dessert was from Gelati, mint chocolate. I describe it as eating frozen creamy Andes’ but my friend said it was like eating cold toothpaste. While waiting for others to arrive we did a sketch session just to spend idle time. The rain poured hard so we were stuck listening to the band for a while, went home for our overnight to watch The Conjuring which I didn’t watch all that much. I was sleepy, it was 3AM. Despite the lack of sleep, we were up by 6AM and jogged around 3kms before having breakfast at Slice. We jogged because I wanted to start my year healthy, as well as I haven’t formally exercised in the longest of times. Besides, it’s my birthday thus it’s a perfect opportunity to let my friends do whatever I want them to do. After breakfast, we felt the urge to sleep so we did. We watched The Mortal Instruments after forty winks, and parted ways after that. BTW, Slice has good Beef Tapa.

Slice's Beef Tapa (Php290) Photo c/o Francis

Kat's breakfast at Slice...yes Kat, I stole your photo.

The last day of my celebration was at Yakimix where I met up with my ex-office mates in the ad agency I once worked in. And as you may know, people you’re with in the hardest of times are those you will laugh with the moment those hardships are over. We were all miserable then, but it was that struggle that pulled us together. We had fun eating and catching up since most of us already resigned. It was definitely good to see them again after over a year.

And so that’s it…time to face the rest of being twenty-five to the remainder of my 352 days of being such.