Geneva (Yeah, Like the Convention) or Finally Getting Around to Blogging This

The cutie between the 2 Beijinoys is Geneva McLoughlin. She's from North Carolina but we met in Beijing. She was in town coupla weeks ago but I only found out by random happenstance.

I was looking to hire a mutual friend for a wedding emcee gig. A woman answered his cellphone. Her voice (and American accent) sounded familiar but I couldn't place it at the time. Next day mutual friend calls back and says Geneva's in town and he had lent her his phone since he's acting as her host during her vacation here. I got to talk to her again and we arranged to meet up once she got back from Cebu. (Yes, mutual friend is thorough w/ the hosting thing. I woulda just brought her to Intramuros.)

Monday the week after while waiting for Geneva at the Power Plant branch of Fully Booked I read some Will Eisner comics (the hell w/ "No Browsing, Pls."). Finally I saw a petite, literally fashionably late woman wearing a vinyl faux snow leopard skin overcoat trying to call me on her cellphone. By the time it rang I was literally behind her. We had coffee at the Starbucks on the same floor.

Little backstory: Probably the most notorious event during Geneva's stay on Beijing was when she was beaned on the head w/ a brick by a fellow student (who was apparently a few bricks short of a load himself) supposedly because he was offended at the sight of her in a miniskirt. In the end she got a mild concussion, suffered some memory loss and we never did find out the identity of the culprit (other than he's the son of some Korean diplomat muckety muck). I even considered using a false identity at the BLCU registrar to try to check his records, but sadly that plan fizzled out.

While a coupla emails from her mom made Geneva's condition sound worse than it actually was (w/c was why I never bothered to email back since I thought she wouldn't remember me anyway), thankfully that wasn't the case. Yeah, she's fine. Seems that one incident (written in the email) about her not remembering her favorite food when her mom placed it in front of her was more a case of Mom bringing out her daughter's favorite food when she was a kid, and daughter casually asking, "What's this?" I totally get that. Hell, I used to like homemade fried chicken as a kid, but I cringe at the thought of eating that mid-deep fried and dried mess now.

Got that? She's fine. After our long chat at Starbucks I invited Debbie and Aileen to join us for dinner at Jollibee, w/c Geneva's been dying (ok, just mildly curious) to try.