This is How I Discovered I Finally Like the Taste of Beer

After four months as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I finally accomplished something in this country: I like beer.

This realization, dare I call it epiphany, came to me suddenly in the midst of me attending the joint birthday party of my friend Yad and her mother. I was accompanied by the town powerhouses: my host father (The Councilman), Nanay Esay (The Mayor), and, lastly, Randy (The Bodyguard: 5 foot 10 and 216 pounds of soft tissue that could, one day in the very, very, very distant future, be sheer muscle).

Sometime between bowing my head and pretending I was Catholic during the prayer before dinner and my third glass of sweet, silky San Miguel beer, I found myself being hit by the mayor during a fit of her laughter as she joked that I would one day be a true Filipina and bear 17 children, all boys named Guille (after The Councilman). So as not to confuse one Guille from the next, their nicknames would be GiGi, LeLe, GilGil, LarLar, GuyGuy, etc. and so forth until the very last of the bunch, who would inevetibly be dubbed the nickname Guille Jr. because the name Guille is only condusive to 16 cutesey nicknames, not 17.

That was only the first time during the evening that The Mayor hit and bruised me. The second time was when she told me, in hysterics, that my future love would be The Bodyguard. Prior to that exact moment, the town joke was that I would marry Wiggy the LBC delivery guy. LBC is the UPS equivalent of the Philippines, and Wiggy is the strange-delivery-guy-who-you-wish-didn't-know-where-you-lived equivalent of the Philippines. Were anyone to write his personal ad, it would surely say: "Very nice delivery guy from LBC, age 53, two cats, lives with mom, has affinity for chocolate ice cream, and likes spaghetti with sausages. A lot." (As a side note, I should probably insert here that he really is very nice) Yet seeing as the constant playful ridicule has had four months to progress, the joke that LBC stands for Loved By Catrina has become quite stale. Only natural that last night, a new series of jokes were begun at my expense.

And through it all, it didn't really matter that I was popular because I was an easy target to laugh at; that the very notion of marriage and children and dating became slightly uncomfortable and completely undesirable to me; that I had bruises the size of small dinner plates on my arms. Through and through, I kept saying, wow, this beer is just so good. And that's how I knew that I finally liked the taste of beer.

The end.