No doubt, sweetie, not a few of the shopaholics among us are still having very cold feet about returning to our refuge from the stresses of everyday life—and, of course, I’m not talking about our homes but those glorious pockets of creature comforts: the malls, where we can destress in such wonderful company as Prada, Escada and Kenneth Cole, among those in the high-end, and Bench and Penshoppe and everything else for everyone else.

The tragic explosion (bombing?) that rocked Glorietta 2 and Park Square 2 in Ayala Center last weekend, and the fire that later broke out at Glorietta 4 mere days later, not only took precious lives—and we do send our heartfelt sympathies to the victims of this awful tragedy—but also no doubt dampened the spirits of those who were just about ready to get into the Christmas spirit.

Nonetheless, sweetie, and without meaning to make light of the awful events recently, we should square our shoulders and move forward—be like New Yorkers in post-9/11 or, especially, like the Pinoys that we are in the wake of all sorts of tragedies, man-made, courtesy of nature, or so-called what lawyers call force majeure. The worst that could happen is to allow tragedy triumph over our collective spirit.

Now, if you are good and ready to jump into the usual ebb-and-flow of everyday life, which, of course, includes spending a good amount of time at the mall, but you remain funny about doing anything remotely Makati besides work, well, sweetie, there’s a glorious place that just sprung up far from the so-called premier commercial-business center of life around these parts. And we’re not even referring to that very posh pocket in the south.

In partnership with an über-powerful consortium, Ayala Malls has unveiled its newest premier shopping destination: Triangle North of Manila, more popularly known as TriNoma, a fabulous and sprawling expanse of retail heaven at the corner of Edsa and and Mindanao Avenue in Quezon City. The mall brings shopping to a whole new playground not only in terms of architectural aesthetics but also in how it seamlessly mixes the high-end, the aspirational and the decidedly midrange in retail, which should make the shopping experience as wonderfully and fabulously Utopian, not unlike how it was back in the glory days of Ernest Santiago’s Cocobanana, where loud drag queens gloriously mixed it up with not a few of society’s crème de la crème. Believe me, sweetie, I was there—at both the recent grand launch of TriNoma and the much-missed Cocobanana during its heydays.

The launch, which was held a week or so before the Glorietta 2-Park Square 2 twin tragedy, was marked by the presence of not only the Ayala Corp. bigwigs, including the forever gloriously handsome Fernando Zobel, but also no less than President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, with Vice President Noli de Castro in tow, plus Quezon City Mayor Feliciano “Sonny” Belmonte.

As you would expect from an Ayala event, sweetie, there was plenty of excellent wine and fab food going around, with Cibo’s Margarita Fores’s exquisite hand evident in the scrumptious delights.