This post started with a mention of not eating pork in my #food channel on my video games guild slack.
I’ll be honest with you, I have never been to a Jollibee. I think I’ve had ships that pass in the night encounters where I saw one in a shopping mall or drove past one on my way someplace else.
It’s not that I didn’t know what it was. I remember my friends in the Old Neighborhood talking about it. Remarking on how weird or how good or how things are different, between Here and Over There. These were the friends whose families “went back home” to the Philippines once a year.
My parents decided that a Private Catholic School Education was more important, this is one of those sacrifices that they made. For reasons unknown to me then, but clearly financial in retrospect, I never went back “home” to the Philippines.
I forgot about Jollibee for a while and then I got to college. I was attending a Filipino Intercollegiate Networking Dialogue in Boston. Jollibee again.
Same conversations. Rumors of one opening stateside begin to circulate. I come back to DC and spread this news to other Filipinos, who in all honesty, get pretty excited about it.
I enter the workforce and three decades pass.
In the background of my life, Jollibee gains a foothold stateside.
In my #food channel a link pops up from one of my Filipino friends. Jollibee is opening up a half hour away.
Slowly a plan forms in my head. It’s weird that the plan involves multiple risk models, but this is the time during which we find ourselves.
And then, “A 46 Year Old Filipino Man Tries Jollibee For the First Time Ever”