Coffee Jars and Papercups
I find it ridiculously amusing that in this age of massive consumption on trivial information, we find wisdom on paper cups and coffee containers. I found this while eating my burger at Gateway Mall food court on a Wednesday afternoon.
"Have it your way". What if we can all have it our ways? Be kings and queens of our own destinies and be righteous on all possible ways. Wake our selves up into a grandiose of constant fantasies or eternal damnation. But we really can’t have it our ways. There’s always an imaginary line limiting us on what we can only take, on what we can do, and on what we can have. Life is a tragic bowl of satire that doesn’t end when death begins, instead it will continue to flourish in an embarrassing staccato of mistaken memories and engraved regrets. Freedom is not boundless, and for those who say they have no regrets in life? I’ll meet you in the theatre of “mouthful of cavities” and toilets of overflowing vomit, because there’s no such thing as having no regrets. (No pun intended).
Upon reading a forwarded email on this, I remembered one of the most common things I see when I was still a little kid, a coffee container. It may be un-amusing and all since what’s a coffee container got to do with this story? Well maybe totally nothing, but growing up in the province has made me appreciate a lot of simple things in everyday life. And most of these simplicities, I saw in our kitchen. We eat on cheap plates made of metals that either our parents bought from the town bazaar or us winning it from the town perya. Our waters were stored on “Kambong”, a handmade clay jar that always make the water cold even without putting any ice in it. And then there was the coffee container. Back home, coffee is one of the food-stuffs a family must always have in their trip to the sari-sari store, and it is contained in a glass bottle with a black cap on it. Nescafe had it in all sizes even in big jar like containers, but we only had the little glass containers, and we had a lot of them. I remember our kitchen is filled with it, a collection from the considerable amount of drinking in our family. We mainly used it as drinking glass after the coffee has been devoured, but it was used in many ways possible. Our salts were stored in it, sugar, bagoong, etc. Thinking back, it wasn’t really on recycling on families then always kept those bottles for use. I ‘d like to think of it as a reminder for us in the life that we would always be living in different paces and phases when need arises, that we are always able to adapt in situations of doubts and fears, and that it doesn’t really matter what we are filling our glasses with, but thinking that we will be able to take them all in when needed.
So maybe I’m not making sense, but maybe I am, hopefully in the most common way possible. I remember my manong Allan would always teach me about having a common sense in everything I do. Knocking it on my head to make sure it sinks in. Making sure that I don’t make mistakes through stupidity, and that I have sorted out everything before making any decisions. I did not appreciate it then just because of the way he was doing it but I understood lately that he was bounded by blood and strong passion to understand life and its unfairness and that nothing comes really easy.
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