The Fabulous Baker Boys

I had the Fabulous Baker Boys over for dinner the other night.

Around 6PM, my friend Antoine texted that he was in the area, and he wanted to see my place.

He had just gone to the hospital to hang out with his younger brother Lance, who works in the outpatient department, where he recently started further training in surgery (Lance is a dentist). They usually meet up once a week, and the last time Antoine was around, we had had dinner downstairs.

I had met Lance only last week, but Antoine is one of my oldest friends, I've known him since kindergarten, and we have been schoolmates since then. Being comfortable with Antoine, we can usually talk up a storm, and I think I might have been too comfortable with Lance then. He was quiet, and was only speaking intermittently. But he was speaking. :-)

"Twan, did you think I was being too loud earlier?" I remembered texting Antoine afterwards. To which he laughingly replied, "No Fan, it's just stranger danger."

"Oh, right." (Really, I should quit asking a lot of questions.)

One time I was asked, "Hey Fan, what do you think the Hand-on-hip posture means?" Antoine and Lance both had the tendency to do the "hand-on-hip" gesture, and they wanted to know what it meant.

"I don't know, Man, I'm not working, I'm off-duty today, remember?"

(Actually, even though I'm in training in Psychiatry, I don't read people as a default mode. I like looking at people, but I don't go around diagnosing them of something one way or another. I don't like labelling people right off the bat. That's pretty draining, don't you think? I once remembered putting in a full day's work worth of interviews and then going out to meet my friends in Makati. I was commuting, and at one time, I got caught in a throng of people who were trying to cross the street, and for a little while, I felt overwhelmed. I remember thinking then, "It's so hard to really know one...how can I ever handle so many people?"

The task of knowing what a patient is going through is quite tedious. To do so requires "active listening", meaning, one has to observe a patient tell his or her stories, knowing when and what to ask, ask the significant other (i.e. watcher/bantay/folks) the same questions to get another side of the story, and just over-all being "in the here and now".)

---------

We ordered pizza and we ended up with two family-sized ones (I had received a promotional text message from Angel's Pizza and if I ordered a family-sized one, I'd get another one free, and then have a 1.5 liter of Coke and carrot cake besides.). When the pizza boy came, with the, umm, carrot cake slice, we had to stifle our guffaws. I was expecting a whole cake. Instead, we got a, well, one that was truly different from what we had expected. I actually felt sorry for the delivery person. )

My cousin Greggy was also sleeping over that night, so there were four of us having pizza dinner at the dinner table. There were laughs all around, as Antoine was telling us funny anecdotes about people and his travels to Europe and Central America. Dentist Lance also had his stories. I shared mine too. It was good fu, and there were a lot of laughs.

Greggy signed off early (I found him sleeping on the couch with the TV on), but the guys and me ended up talking until morning in the balcony). It was 3AM when they left, actually.

 

-------

Lance and Antoine don't look anything alike, but Antoine says they have the same forehead (but he looks like their sister Nikki's daughter), they're both tall, though, and Lance is taller at 5'11" or 6', to Antoine's 5'10" (with slouching). They were so much alike in different ways though, and Lance could match Antoine book for book, and little historical info per little historical info. (I learned quite a lot about other things in life, and between them, I got another little list of recommended books to read. :-) )

-----

"Fan, why don't you write a book about all your experiences here...?" Antoine suggested.

"I suppose...maybe someday I will, but I'll use psuedonyms, a lot of them, of course." I answered.

-------

(Thus this blog. :-))

Love,

S.

P.S. The Fabulous Baker Boys is a movie with Beau and Jeff Bridges in it, plus Michelle Pfieffer. Saw it when I was in grade school...the title seemed apt, even Twan and Lance's last name isn't Baker. Starts with a B, but it's not Baker. :-)