The Spy in the Sandwich

Thursday, September 30, 2004

5:24 PM | One Particular Stupid, Ugly, Toady Freak

Quick, quick!

Remember what I told you earlier about Strange People Who Comment? Go to the comments section of my post on Chris Abella. Waaaay down there.

Her name's Nina. Say hello to Nina, everybody.

(Hello, Nina!)

Good.

Now, Nina wants you to know mga flies kayo who love to swarm around the tae of a kalabaw (read: me!).

Bwahahaha! This is so precious. I inspire such devotion! I am not even deleting this. I'm not being ironic here, but Nina... I love your style, baby.

In other news: it's Hell Week in Silliman. No, Gabs, you're not the only one. So, I won't be around for a few days to regale you with tae tales. So, buzz off for a while, my dear flies. Your King Tae will come back soon.

5:24 PM | One Particular Stupid, Ugly, Toady Freak

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

7:33 PM | A Break in Chris's Murder Case

Here's a Philippine Daily Inquirer story on the butcher who got arrested as a suspect in Chris' death. A butcher. How fucking appropriate.

[via babel machine]

7:33 PM | A Break in Chris's Murder Case

Here's a Philippine Daily Inquirer story on the butcher who got arrested as a suspect in Chris' death. A butcher. How fucking appropriate.

[via babel machine]

7:33 PM | A Break in Chris's Murder Case

Here's a Philippine Daily Inquirer story on the butcher who got arrested as a suspect in Chris' death. A butcher. How fucking appropriate.

[via babel machine]

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

3:53 PM | More Stupid, Ugly Freaks

If you've been reading some of the comments either in Tagboard and Haloscan -- that is, if you've been fast enough to get to them before I deleted most of them -- you would have noticed that I do attract some crazies. Homophobes, rabid pedants, religious slimeballs, schizoids na walang k, and anonymous hecklers. Tsk, tsk. Of course, I take this as a badge of honor. But sometimes I think: Why the heck are they in my blog?

I'm on the third day of my diet -- and so far, no fainting spells, only tempting memories of rich food. Ginny and I have made a pact (a wager!) that we will lose 25 lbs. before the year is over. (Although I told Ginny she looks sexy the way she is. I mean, come on, not everybody can boast of a fashion spread in Cosmopolitan magazine!) I've restructured my diet na, Skyflakes and plain water being dinner, and vegetables being lunch, without rice at all; and tomorrow, I start gym. I feel thin already.

3:53 PM | More Stupid, Ugly Freaks

1:28 AM | On Chris Abella

Ano ba? Another friend -- and another Christopher -- is in danger. Christopher Abella (we all know this guy as Chris or Kuya Chris or Paui or Papa Paui), father of two and husband of Mayen Foronda, is in the last stages of renal failure. He needs our prayers.

The last time I saw Chris, I was walking down Hibbard Avenue. He was riding his motorbike with Mayen. He looked cheerful.

"Hey, Ian!" he called out. "Guess what. I had a stroke!"

Just like that.

Aghast, I told him how could that be, he was too young.

"It's all the rich food in Why Not?, that's what I think," he said. And then after more casual chit-chat -- how can one have casual chit-chat about strokes? -- we parted.

Hang in there, Chris. Our prayers are with you.

1:28 AM | On Chris Abella

Monday, September 27, 2004

1:48 AM | More National Book Awards Brouhaha...

Remember all that brouhaha over the National Book Awards? Over children's literature and chick lit? Over Mango Comics' Darna and Gelo's The Nymph of MTV? I thought the whole issue was over, but Adam David over at Elephant Still Missing still has some interesting things to say in the following comments exchange.

1:48 AM | More National Book Awards Brouhaha...

Sunday, September 26, 2004

10:05 AM | Out!

JM Cobarrubias (here with Cheche Lazaro) gets the third degree in today's Sunday Inquirer Magazine. I've always admired this guy from way back in The Probe Team. And the fact that he outed himself on national television was simply amazing. Not many people I know are that brave.

10:05 AM | Out!

Saturday, September 25, 2004

7:13 PM | People Murder For This?

Dinah asks why Filipinos murder for cellphones...

I still have this Nokia 3210, which I will never ever exchange for any of those shiny new things. It's sturdy, it's very functional, it still looks sleek, and it's very user-friendly.

And I don't think anyone would want to rob me of this. Last time I checked, this phone went for a mere P1,500. That made me laugh. I am so cheap. But safe naman. (The other night, though, during a small dinner party, Bing Valbuena brought out her cellphone which was one of those really ancient things, the ones with antennas. "O--, naay mo reklamo?" she said. That brought the house down.)

7:13 PM | People Murder For This?

6:43 PM | Art in a Time of Terror

I wrote this a day after I heard Chris was shot by cellphone robbers. The tragedy occupied my mind all through the day and in the beginnings of weekend. I saw Chris's shadow everywhere...

Art in a Time of Terror

Thinking back, it must have been around the time I was preparing to go see the art exhibit on show in the Silliman University Main Library this week -- a collection to commemorate Peace Week -- when I first heard via an SMS alert that my friend and college classmate Chris Misajon -- son of former Silliman President Mervyn Misajon -- was fighting for his life in an Iloilo hospital, becoming yet another statistic in the creeping reality of murderous cellphone robbers.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer/GMA News Network website had it as a breaking story: "[He] was driving with a companion on a dimly lit street when at least four robbers flagged them down... While his companion ran for help, the suspects shot Misajon and took his cellular phone." That's it. Human life for a piece of merchandise.

Later, I learned that a shotgun had been leveled at his guts.

"He was shot at close range," Eric Joven, another friend, had texted those of us who were suddenly in the grips of bearing bad news. "He was hit at the left side of his abdomen," his kidney shattered, but more than that, there were shotgun splinters all over his other organs -- the liver, the pancreas, the intestines. It took nine hours for the doctors to clean everything out. Much later, we learn from GMA-7 producer and former classmate Ahd Marco that Chris was recuperating in Intensive Care, but now he was within what the doctors called the "72-hour critical period," after which we could finally learn whether our friend's life -- as a young father and husband and as a dedicated TV news anchor -- had been spared. We have learned to count the hours.

Sometimes, it is increasingly hard to believe there could be anything less in our lives than the paramount knowledge of our daily encounters with terrors big and small. Sometimes, when we feel the burden and the weight of such grim realities in our lives, we learn to ask questions without answers: What for everything, given all these? What now?

Specifically, art. What for, art, indeed? If art is supposed to be the classic human celebration of beauty, does it have any import in times of terror?

You could say this notions of dark days was born under what sequential storyteller and Pulitzer Prise winner Art Spiegelman has called "the shadow of no towers," bearing in mind the repercussions of that fateful day in September 2001 when we knew for sure that the world as we knew it was in for some extensive turbulence. Those turbulences have indeed come true, spilling blood and guts all over the world, from Bali to Manila, from Baghdad to Madrid, from Jerusalem to Islamabad, from Washington, D.C. to Riyadh.

In his recent essay, "Writing in a Time of Terror and the (Mis)Manmagement of Grief," Filipino writer Charlson Ong writes about such repercussion on his fiction: "No doubt the events of 9/11 and their consequences have cast a shadow over our work as writers. Already, fictionists like Salman Rushdie and Haruki Murakami have responded with important works. As a nation, we have been victim to political and sectarian violence even before the catastrophe in New York. You in Mindanao have had to live with war or the threat of it for many decades. But now, our involvement in America's 'war against terror' threatens to engage us in a broader conflict."

Art does not develop in a vacuum, indeed, as F. Sionil Jose used to say. Echoing Salvador Lopez, the National Artist for Literature had continued: "The artist is first responsible not just to his art but to society as well."

Ong further writes: "Historically, conflict and catastrophe often bring out the best in artists. Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov deal with the drama wrought by profound changes in Russia at the end of the 19th century. World War II spawned such novels as Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead and Stevan Javellana's Without Seeing the Dawn. The Spanish Civil War inspired Picasso's Guernica. Lu Xun wrote Ah Q during the 1920s as China suffered imperial collapse, strife and foreign aggression. So, too, the excesses of the 'Cultural Revolution' of 1960s became the subject of the new wave of Chinese cinema as well as the work of Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian. Apartheid in South Africa was the canvas across which Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetze painted their intimate literary portraits."

Thus, in the tradition of Pablo Picasso's Guernica (the Spanish artist's famous abstract, painterly thesis on the horrors of war), we now have within the very walls of Silliman University's Main Library a continuation of the artistic treatise on the meaning of war and peace in an Age of Chaos and Terror. Timely, too, because the exhibit -- sponsored by Silliman’s Peace Resource Center -- comes during the week when all of the Philippines remember the imposition of Martial Law by then dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

The exhibit is interesting for two reasons. One is its curatorial decision to juxtapose the works of established artists now working in Dumaguete with works by young amateurs -- teenagers and grade-school children, I take it, who had taken to the brush and the canvas in an "on-the-spot" art competition to celebrate Peace Week. These works -- some of them colorful doodles done with such grand passions, and perhaps reflective of the Matisse style -- are a merry insight on young people's conception of what is happening right now in our society, proof perhaps that they, too, know the gravity of things happening.

The other reason, for me, is the way the exhibit makes me see how artists render social reality. I like the way some of the works channel our pains with such subtle use of imagery and composition. I like their thoughtful provocation. Others, however, disappoint by giving something "too easy": a bludgeoning of on-your-face "message," in other words.

But this is, nevertheless, only a critic's demand. I am even ashamed to demand so much from an exhibit of good intentions. Over-all, one must only admire the way our artists have indeed lived Sionil's call, that "art must not develop in a vacuum." These works have something to say, that is important. But some just say it more poetically than the others.

Of the more seasoned artists, exhibits such as this tend to draw out the pedantic, the didactic. You know... artwork that slaps you with "obvious" message -- a clear line drawn between point A and point B. Sometimes I call this "PLDT Art," referring to the competition sponsored by the telephone company that calls for artworks celebrating "nationhood," the best of which becomes the cover for PLDT's annual phone directory.

Sometimes I call this "Obvious Art." But, really, I have no real quarrels with such art, only with their easy blatancy. What to make of Diosdado Custodio's "Let Peace Arise," for example? The title tells us enough of what the painting means to "be," including the motif of a hand breaking glass, bearing roses. Or Crystlyne Faith Gayo's "Deuteronony 30:19," which just shows us the scale of justice, licked by flame and dotted with doves with laurel leaves in their beaks? Or Helton Jerome Acahay's "Deep Within a Rifle," where a green hand reaches for the insides of a rifle, only to reveal what looks like the entire circulatory system? If poetry is supposed to be about beauty in the tangential, there's no poetry here, only a rendering of the didactic and the obvious. There's also Rene Elivera's "A Piece of My Peace," a nonetheless interesting work that still showcases the obvious: a background of dusk with a foreground of blooded barbwires suddenly revealing a rose. The talented Mr. Elivera has made more demanding paintings, of course. Just not this one.

I find that the more interesting works in the exhibit lie in their almost subversive use of the obvious, however.

Sharon Rose Dadang-Rafol's "A Bubble of Hope," for instance, may seem flippant in its use of blue and green bubbles, complete with praying hands and tulips, but the pastel rendering and the implied message that all of these are "bubbles" hint of the precariousness, indeed, of hope in post-modern times.

Susan Canoy's "Temporaryong Kalinaw" also hints at this. Hers is a work also done in strange bright pastels and in painstakingly rendered realism, and surrealism. What you have is an image of a family in dead-center between what seems to be representations of country and city. The "nice" family, however, is surrounded with balloons -- labeled "temporaryong kalinaw" -- which are almost ready to burst. I liked the feel of danger to this seemingly bright picture. That, for me, is subversive, and saves the work from being too obvious.

Jaruvic Rafols's "Black Eye Peace," too, is of that mold. He features a huge human eye in the center of widening rainbow ripples, with a pair of hands somewhere in the composition gripping at something. There is something there, a hallucinatory take of perceptions, perhaps. There's also Lord Allen Hernandez's "Unity Against Diversity," the title of which may hint of the Obvious. But Mr. Hernandez saves his work with his delicious play of shadows and color, and the use of an interesting image -- what looks like puppet figures (a man in Muslim garb, a priest, and a woman) embracing for the "light." Very interesting, but again, there is nothing new here.

Over red wine last Thursday night in CocoAmigos, I asked artist Mark Valenzuela what he intended to say in "Love Affair." What I get of the painting are two blue human figures -- a Muslim and a Christian -- under seawater, bubbles drawing out their last breath. He just smiled and said, "Under water, all you have is silence." Which is interesting concept going beyond Obvious.

But the first thing that drew my attention, though, is Jutze Pamate's "The Terrorist Dogs and the Doves of Peace." The title alone sounds so much like one of those magic realist opus by some South American writer. The artwork itself is thought-provoking: two orange dogs (one prominently splashed in the foreground) with beady eyes, standing on their hind legs, surrounded -- attacked? -- by doves. I like the use of metaphor. I like the composition. I like the comical sense the work displays that nonetheless also shows an understanding of this prevalent undercurrent of restiveness, of the animalism of terror. But Pamate has always done this: his paintings have always been brilliant social commentary, but without the obviousness that mars most artists' works.

In the end, I can say that Art perhaps becomes our ultimate refuge in times of terror. Not an escape, no. It makes sense -- within frames, within measured color and composition -- of senseless times. It captures zeitgeist in its rendering of metaphors, in brush strokes (and for writers, in words), the perfect mouthpiece with which we tell our story of understanding of a troubled world. In art, we get an understanding of the latter's complexity, and perhaps of hope. For the artist, his/her art is expression of what is bottled up within us all. Conversely for the viewer, the art becomes the medium, the Rorschach ink blot, with and upon which we heap our pains. Art is necessary.

6:43 PM | Art in a Time of Terror

6:25 PM | Goodbye, Chris

Dinah was crying when she called me up earlier. Saturday was a bright day, but it was also gloomy for many of us who heard the final devastating news. From Australia, Kristyn wrote this eulogy for Chris just this morning when we all finally learned he did not make it through the night. Chris died at 1 a.m. This essay will appear in MetroPost this Sunday.

Thanks, Chris

The hardest thing to do is to write about someone who is not with us anymore. Someone you thought you'd always have the chance to meet again someday. So you don't take the extra effort to correspond with them.

Then something happens. And all you can do is regret not taking that extra measure to even just drop him an email.

Christopher Misajon died yesterday morning. He was 28. But this article talks about his life and the memories he left us, not his senseless death.

Christopher was one of the wittiest guys I have ever met in my entire life (and I've met plenty of VIPs through my line of work). He stood out back in Silliman University, not just because he was the university president's son, but because he carried an air of authority around him that very few people have. I first met him during Spanish 11 class and we immediately didn't like each other. For me, he was a snob; for him, I was a childish freshman.

But wonders of all wonders, we ended up hanging with the same crowd. And I realized how down to earth he really was. I remember he almost missed his own graduation because he would rather play Duke Nukem with us. We finally managed to pull him out of the room so he could walk on that stage and get his diploma.

He was known as "that guy" who rode his bike all over Dumaguete City. But to us, he was just goofy Chris who liked his computer games and talked incessantly about "nerdy" stuff.

He was a ladies' man, that guy. He could sing, he could talk well, he was tall, he was good looking and intelligent, and he had an abundant amount of confidence. I thought he was either going to be a journalist or a politician. So it was no surprise (and a great relief that he took the road with lesser evils) when I found out that he became the newsreader for ABS-CBN, and then later on for GMA network. Christopher was born to be in the limelight. It was inevitable.

Although majority of those who knew him was automatically drawn to him, there were several people who did not like Chris. They took his honesty as arrogance and his outspokenness as conceit. But for me, the best thing about him was his honesty. He didn't necessarily put it in the nicest way possible but that's just Chris. And it was refreshing to hear someone who was not afraid to say things other people just thought about.

I was surprised to find out he got married and had a son. I always thought he would end up flying the world instead. But when I saw him with his family in SM Cebu about two years ago, I knew he was home. He had that certain glint of content that happy people can't hide and others cannot fake.

Some idiot told him one night a couple of years back that he was dispensable in the company he previously worked for. But like what I told him that one night we went out in Cagayan de Oro, Chris is never dispensable. He was made to get to the top.

We haven't seen each other in a long time, mainly because we don't have each other's contact details. And I feel a bit embarrassed writing this when I feel I really do not know him that well the way others do. But then again, Chris was someone to several people. To many, he was the face of TV. For others, he was a son, a brother, a friend, a husband, and a father.

Sitting alone in Sydney, miles away from friends, the only way I can cope is through writing this for him. This is my way of thanking Chris for the good memories he shared with the gang and me. Thanks, Keg ... I hope you finally got your six-pack.

6:25 PM | Goodbye, Chris

Friday, September 24, 2004

11:29 PM | Stupid Freaks

Some people are funny the way they flaunt their insecurities. They post comments on your tagboard -- which are deletable, by the way -- telling you to break up with somebody because "dili mo bagay, prangka lang." I mean, what is that? Who is he? Is he God? Is he the bodalicious arbiter of things "bagay"?

Who are you Alex, you ugly freak?

This world is crazy.

11:29 PM | Stupid Freaks

Thursday, September 23, 2004

1:32 PM | Chris Needs Our Prayers!

To the guys of the Midnight Society.

Bad, bad news in. A good friend of ours -- Chris Misajon -- is fighting for his life after being shot by robbers for his cellphone. The story is in Inq7.net.

1:32 PM | Chris Needs Our Prayers!

3:07 AM | Literatura

Finally, I got around to uploading the latest issue of Literatura Magazine.

So here you go, the winning entries to this year's Palanca Awards. Enjoy the feast. More coming soon.

3:07 AM | Literatura

Finally, I got around to uploading the latest issue of Literatura Magazine.

So here you go, the winning entries to this year's Palanca Awards. Enjoy the feast. More coming soon.

3:07 AM | Literatura

Finally, I got around to uploading the latest issue of Literatura Magazine.

So here you go, the winning entries to this year's Palanca Awards. Enjoy the feast. More coming soon.

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

10:55 AM | Hot Christian Romance

Umm, what? Christian romance novels?

Apparently, yes.

Try this. Fabio gazes into her eyes, and she melts in his arms. And then, with quivering lips, she tells him softly, "Honey ... honey, honey, honey ... we're late for prayer meeting."

10:55 AM | Hot Christian Romance

Monday, September 20, 2004

11:32 PM | Sabi ng student ko, "Who's Marshall? And why does he have a law?"

It's September 21 pala tomorrow. Manuel L. Quezon III writes about Martial Law in the Philippine Daily Inquirer:

Martial law was a great divide; even today, it separates all that came before, from all that has come since. Our history before 1972, when you think of it, represents the profound influence ideas and intellectuals can impact on a nation. The history of the Philippines since martial law has been marked by the steady bankruptcy of ideas and those who propagate them in our society.

The ideas -- and ideals -- of the propaganda movement; the motives and motivations of the revolution; the adaptation of the heritage of both in our attempt to reclaim our independence; the great thoughts that tried to give meaning and relevance to independence once reestablished in 1946: our country's story has been the story of thoughts, of ideas that moved the sectors that constitute our nation.

But after 1972, ideas and the intellectuals and ideologues who make them have increasingly been sidelined in the story of our national life: not least because so many intellectuals sold out or were deluded into supporting the dictatorship. The dictatorship, too, in wrecking the economy and turning us into a nation of overseas workers, virtually liquidated our middle class as a moving force of national development, and guaranteed that fewer and fewer Filipinos would have the capacity to be inspired, much less motivated, by ideas. Even people power, as we have seen in the 21 years since Ninoy Aquino's assassination, has never been fully formed, made truly workable, as a motivational idea. We have tried to make people power part of our lives, but its principles are so vague, its applications so unclear that we have gotten to be unsure if it was ever a real thought at all. People power was-is-perhaps, more of an emotion than a genuine idea.

The complete article is here.

11:32 PM | Sabi ng student ko, "Who's Marshall? And why does he have a law?"

It's September 21 pala tomorrow. Manuel L. Quezon III writes about Martial Law in the Philippine Daily Inquirer:

Martial law was a great divide; even today, it separates all that came before, from all that has come since. Our history before 1972, when you think of it, represents the profound influence ideas and intellectuals can impact on a nation. The history of the Philippines since martial law has been marked by the steady bankruptcy of ideas and those who propagate them in our society.

The ideas -- and ideals -- of the propaganda movement; the motives and motivations of the revolution; the adaptation of the heritage of both in our attempt to reclaim our independence; the great thoughts that tried to give meaning and relevance to independence once reestablished in 1946: our country's story has been the story of thoughts, of ideas that moved the sectors that constitute our nation.

But after 1972, ideas and the intellectuals and ideologues who make them have increasingly been sidelined in the story of our national life: not least because so many intellectuals sold out or were deluded into supporting the dictatorship. The dictatorship, too, in wrecking the economy and turning us into a nation of overseas workers, virtually liquidated our middle class as a moving force of national development, and guaranteed that fewer and fewer Filipinos would have the capacity to be inspired, much less motivated, by ideas. Even people power, as we have seen in the 21 years since Ninoy Aquino's assassination, has never been fully formed, made truly workable, as a motivational idea. We have tried to make people power part of our lives, but its principles are so vague, its applications so unclear that we have gotten to be unsure if it was ever a real thought at all. People power was-is-perhaps, more of an emotion than a genuine idea.

The complete article is here.

11:32 PM | Sabi ng student ko, "Who's Marshall? And why does he have a law?"

It's September 21 pala tomorrow. Manuel L. Quezon III writes about Martial Law in the Philippine Daily Inquirer:

Martial law was a great divide; even today, it separates all that came before, from all that has come since. Our history before 1972, when you think of it, represents the profound influence ideas and intellectuals can impact on a nation. The history of the Philippines since martial law has been marked by the steady bankruptcy of ideas and those who propagate them in our society.

The ideas -- and ideals -- of the propaganda movement; the motives and motivations of the revolution; the adaptation of the heritage of both in our attempt to reclaim our independence; the great thoughts that tried to give meaning and relevance to independence once reestablished in 1946: our country's story has been the story of thoughts, of ideas that moved the sectors that constitute our nation.

But after 1972, ideas and the intellectuals and ideologues who make them have increasingly been sidelined in the story of our national life: not least because so many intellectuals sold out or were deluded into supporting the dictatorship. The dictatorship, too, in wrecking the economy and turning us into a nation of overseas workers, virtually liquidated our middle class as a moving force of national development, and guaranteed that fewer and fewer Filipinos would have the capacity to be inspired, much less motivated, by ideas. Even people power, as we have seen in the 21 years since Ninoy Aquino's assassination, has never been fully formed, made truly workable, as a motivational idea. We have tried to make people power part of our lives, but its principles are so vague, its applications so unclear that we have gotten to be unsure if it was ever a real thought at all. People power was-is-perhaps, more of an emotion than a genuine idea.

The complete article is here.

11:13 PM | Swiss Chocolate and Gmail Invites

I have bags of Swiss chocolate in my pad.

Oh God.

By the way, I never knew there was a premium on Gmail invites. Everybody wants one. I have four invites left. Any takers?

11:13 PM | Swiss Chocolate and Gmail Invites

I have bags of Swiss chocolate in my pad.

Oh God.

By the way, I never knew there was a premium on Gmail invites. Everybody wants one. I have four invites left. Any takers?

11:13 PM | Swiss Chocolate and Gmail Invites

I have bags of Swiss chocolate in my pad.

Oh God.

By the way, I never knew there was a premium on Gmail invites. Everybody wants one. I have four invites left. Any takers?

8:02 AM | Why you shouldn't hate Marc Gaba.

Secondcup rounds up the current state of literary critcism in the Philippines.

[via psychicpants]

8:02 AM | Why you shouldn't hate Marc Gaba.

Secondcup rounds up the current state of literary critcism in the Philippines.

[via psychicpants]

8:02 AM | Why you shouldn't hate Marc Gaba.

Secondcup rounds up the current state of literary critcism in the Philippines.

[via psychicpants]

Saturday, September 18, 2004

1:27 AM | eXperim[E]nto!

I saw this film, Dutch filmmaker Van Paul Ruven's Maxima's Miracle, last night at the Luce Auditorium (imagine that!). It was the closing film of the three-day eXperim[E]nto Film Festival, which is now on its second year in Silliman University.

The Dutch film was strangely so-so. I expected so much more.

The best film I saw this week was a Spanish short by Martin Rosete titled Revolucion (Revolution). It was cheeky and intellectual, and cheeky about being too intellectual. And all it stars is an old man, a claustrophobic room with one window, a bed, a wardrobe, and a table.

Brilliant!

1:27 AM | eXperim[E]nto!

Brilliant!

1:27 AM | eXperim[E]nto!

Brilliant!

1:04 AM | The Grim Sign of Troubled Days

I was doing my rounds of blog hopping over the weekend, when I came across a couple of brilliant posts by two writer-friends -- the poet Paolo Manalo, who is the literary editor of Philippines Free Press, and the sequential lit master (and new Palanca winner) Dean Francis Alfar.

They were both talking about the state of the professional class in the Philippines -- and how we have come to such seismic shifts in our expectations of success that no longer do we want to be doctors or lawyers or engineers or teachers. What do we all want now in a society eaten to its very core by mismanagement and corruption?

We all want to be the next Mark Herras.

These are Dean and Paolo in their own words, copied verbatim from their own weblogs.

Dean writes:

Over dinner at Little Asia along Tomas Morato (selected by our youngest gourmand Ralph for their delectable Boneless Tilapia in Honey-Mayo Sauce), the gang and I engaged in talk about jobs like the old farts that some of us are becoming.

I grew up during the time when, when thinking about a stable future for their children, parents would insist on a certain hierarchy of professions. Tier One: Doctor, Lawyer; Tier Two: Architect, Engineer, and so on. It was drummed into my head that these were the jobs that guaranteed financial independence and a good life, along with respectability and a very high position in the social strata.

In fact, I was so brainwashed by their conviction that I moved through my formative years convinced that I needed to be a doctor or a lawyer. Nothing else would do. My little talent with words was considered of interest but of no real import or relevance to real life. When I applied for college, I landed a pre-med quota course at UP Diliman, which would enable me to make my final choice between law and medicine. Later, I came to my senses when my unhappiness became too much to bear and I abandoned the prescribed path, stunning my three parents (my mother and stepfather called in my biological father from the US so they could triple play me). My final choice was to go where my heart led me, and they all forecast doom, misery and inevitable poverty.

A few days ago, I began to gather information on how well these high priority professions pay.

I encountered an architect who works for a small firm with competitive pay. Only a few years younger than myself, he had the title of Senior Architect. His monthly salary is just around the same amount a fresh graduate working in a call center would make. Starting architects make as much as I would pay a Junior Designer in my own company.

With doctors, you need to be very well-connected or wealthy in the first place. For example, to have a clinic in the new hospital along Ortigas, you need to plunk down P10 million, in addition to other expenses. Or you work as an employee for a company like Clinica Manila with a stunningly low monthly wage augmented by your P300 consultation fees. Or even worse, you can work for the small derma clinics and make much less.

With law, unless you're into Tax Law or Corporate Law, your monthly take-home for the many rungs of the ladder is nowhere near the promised bonanza. I know of a trial lawyer who struggles to make ends meet: his salary is barely enough to support himself, his wife, two children and payments on their home. Unless you create a niche like my brother, it's going to be long and hard road.

It is not much different for other professions. For example, a new policeman makes around P12k a month, with incremental raises as they get promotions, all the way to the rank of Director which makes around P40k.

A manager at a resto chain makes around P15k, while it is minimum wage for staff-level positions and their equivalents (salesgirls, promofolk, waiters, and the like).

Insurance promises gigantic windfalls if you are a killer salesperson with incredible connections. Then you get to drive around in a Jaguar. Otherwise, you experience life in feast-or-famine mode.

Teachers continue to get underpaid compared to the private sector. You can spend years as a consultant in consultancy firms at around P12k-P15k. Think your MBA can help you? At one point in time, a brilliant acquaintance of mine with an MBA from the requisite impressive US school was making around P30k. Another MBA holder is currently jobless and is willing to work for peanuts.

Professional writing is not much better. You can freelance and get a word rate, averaging around P1.5k-P2.5k per article for magazines from the Summit Group, or be employed by a company with copy requirements for around P15k-P20k. Pure creative writers who dream of living off publishing royalties in the Philippines have to produce a large number of best-selling books in a short span of time, in an industry where print runs are generally 1,000 copies (with big print runs at around 10,000 copies).

The tech industry had its heyday with the bubble of irrational exuberance. At one point in time, designers could command up to P60k, with managerial salaries over P100k. Those days, of course, are gone, with a few sterling exceptions.

Advertising and marketing companies exist in an odd space. On one hand, if you are a creative, you are pretty much taken care of. If you consistently do good work and bring in awards, your pay will grow as you climb up the pyramid, earning anywhere from P30k to P80k and even higher. However, in the same industry, rank and file (and account executives) operate along the same low pay level: start at around P8k and progress to the twenties.

Creatives also do well in similar industries (acting, directing, production). Actors can do TV series and get around P50k per episode or do TV guesting at around P10k to 15k (they get bigger paychecks with films). TV advertising directors can make from P80k upwards. MTV directors can charge along P100k+, depending on the producers -- but if you're new and unheard of, chances are you'll be doing it for much much less, if you're tasked to do it at all. Composers begin at around P30k for a jingle if you're friends. Food stylists can make a killing, given the fact that so few of high caliber exist -- they charge P7.5k-P25k per plate (per layout). While starting photographers make around P5k-P10k per shoot, big name photographers play at P150k+ per day (there's also cutthroat competition for the wedding market).

For me though, nothing beats having your own business. The risks and headaches are terrifying, but everything balances out. Your small business can grow and take care of your future. Owners of restos, retail stores and other small businesses can pay themselves what their books can afford.

At a recent job fair, the organizers were forced to extend their hours and days to accommodate the thousands of people looking for work. Growing unemployment is a reality, with thousands of new graduates joining the ranks of the jobless every year. Openings are biased towards those who matriculated from the "top" schools: UP, Ateneo and La Salle. But having a diploma from those schools is not a guarantee of a job, much less good pay.

What does all this mean? When my daughter is of the appropriate age for such things, I will tell her: (1) Whatever you choose to be, make sure you like it. Find a job that fits you or, if it does not exist, create it. Follow your bliss but manage your own expectations. (2) You do not have to be a doctor or a lawyer or a corporate person to be comfortable. Define what makes you comfortable and work to achieve it. Do not buy in the previous generations' flawed reasoning spawned by the need for social positioning. (3) Do not undervalue your creative abilities. Contrary to what I was taught to believe in, words or a good eye for beauty CAN feed you. Develop your skill sets in language, writing, art and similar lines. (4) Look at starting a business. Even if, like me, you don't think you’re a businessman, you could be surprised. (5) The good life isn't about money, so that shouldn't be your number one priority. But if you want to be able to travel around Europe, barefoot and carefree for three years, you need to be able to pay for it. (6) Abolish the notion of job hierarchy from your mind. As long the people holding jobs maintain their values and principles, no one job is intrinsically superior to the next. Apart from that, I really don't know.

And Paolo writes:

Yes, 'tis the season to be Starstruck once more. It was only a few months back when Anj was convincing us all to go to Broadway Centrum for the first Starstruck. During its first weeks it had no audience and they had to pay people fifty pesos to watch it. Then they stopped paying the audience because soon fans clubs emerged and the lines were so long they had to tighten security.

Now, Piercing Pens observes that many teenagers are desperate to dream, believe and survive to be the next generation of Filipino superstars. These past few years, their ambition in life has shifted from becoming astronauts, engineers and doctors to becoming caregivers and cultural entertainers overseas. Now they hope to be movie and television stars, veejays and noontime show hosts. As Rolando B. Tolentino put it clearly during a symposium where we were both speakers. There's a shift from intellectual investment (puhunan) that one gets from proper schooling and education to a more physical puhunan: one's looks, body and manual labor over one's intelligence and wealth of knowledge. The example he cited was Hero Angeles from the star search show from the rival network. A UP student, Angeles didn't rely on his education but banked on his physical appearance that now guarantees him better financial gain and puts him in a better social position. If land was a sign of power during our Spanish colonial past, then education during our American colonial period, now it is the body that is used as capital. This all ties up with Tolentino's theory of the Philippines as a sexualized nation, where the only thing maybe preventing our economy from collapsing are the remittances from the overseas Filipino workers, most of them using their bodies in service-oriented or manual work.

It's a lack of faith in the Philippine educational system, especially when a college degree from a Filipino school or university fails to secure a career with better pay and better living conditions. So many unemployed college graduates find themselves accepting call center and other outsource labor jobs from multinational companies that it seems to be an undergrad's rite of passage. Either after graduation or a few semesters before graduation, a student (from these exclusive schools and prime universities in Metro Manila) finds he or she has to get this outsourcing job, part time at first then slowly, slowly after so many class sessions are missed, completely leaving school and then living the night shift or that of a contractual worker just to get some financial advancement.

And what's better than answering calls and troubleshooting during those harrowing hours of the graveyard shift? Superstardom. After all, the only requirements seem to be that you have to be young, willing and be present. No talent, no experience necessary as long as you have an image that can be worked on by a good PR team. If fortunate, success and upper social mobility happen immediately. If not, oh well ... at least you had your fifteen minutes of fame.

So who needs school? And who wants to work in cubicles with a faux American or English accent, or clean as you go as a service crew in fastfoods when you can be the next packaged image for a whole new generation to adore. And then someday ... politics!

All I can do is nod, and sigh a very troubled sigh.

1:04 AM | The Grim Sign of Troubled Days

Over dinner at Little Asia along Tomas Morato (selected by our youngest gourmand Ralph for their delectable Boneless Tilapia in Honey-Mayo Sauce), the gang and I engaged in talk about jobs like the old farts that some of us are becoming.

I grew up during the time when, when thinking about a stable future for their children, parents would insist on a certain hierarchy of professions. Tier One: Doctor, Lawyer; Tier Two: Architect, Engineer, and so on. It was drummed into my head that these were the jobs that guaranteed financial independence and a good life, along with respectability and a very high position in the social strata.

In fact, I was so brainwashed by their conviction that I moved through my formative years convinced that I needed to be a doctor or a lawyer. Nothing else would do. My little talent with words was considered of interest but of no real import or relevance to real life. When I applied for college, I landed a pre-med quota course at UP Diliman, which would enable me to make my final choice between law and medicine. Later, I came to my senses when my unhappiness became too much to bear and I abandoned the prescribed path, stunning my three parents (my mother and stepfather called in my biological father from the US so they could triple play me). My final choice was to go where my heart led me, and they all forecast doom, misery and inevitable poverty.

A few days ago, I began to gather information on how well these high priority professions pay.

I encountered an architect who works for a small firm with competitive pay. Only a few years younger than myself, he had the title of Senior Architect. His monthly salary is just around the same amount a fresh graduate working in a call center would make. Starting architects make as much as I would pay a Junior Designer in my own company.

With doctors, you need to be very well-connected or wealthy in the first place. For example, to have a clinic in the new hospital along Ortigas, you need to plunk down P10 million, in addition to other expenses. Or you work as an employee for a company like Clinica Manila with a stunningly low monthly wage augmented by your P300 consultation fees. Or even worse, you can work for the small derma clinics and make much less.

With law, unless you're into Tax Law or Corporate Law, your monthly take-home for the many rungs of the ladder is nowhere near the promised bonanza. I know of a trial lawyer who struggles to make ends meet: his salary is barely enough to support himself, his wife, two children and payments on their home. Unless you create a niche like my brother, it's going to be long and hard road.

It is not much different for other professions. For example, a new policeman makes around P12k a month, with incremental raises as they get promotions, all the way to the rank of Director which makes around P40k.

A manager at a resto chain makes around P15k, while it is minimum wage for staff-level positions and their equivalents (salesgirls, promofolk, waiters, and the like).

Insurance promises gigantic windfalls if you are a killer salesperson with incredible connections. Then you get to drive around in a Jaguar. Otherwise, you experience life in feast-or-famine mode.

Teachers continue to get underpaid compared to the private sector. You can spend years as a consultant in consultancy firms at around P12k-P15k. Think your MBA can help you? At one point in time, a brilliant acquaintance of mine with an MBA from the requisite impressive US school was making around P30k. Another MBA holder is currently jobless and is willing to work for peanuts.

Professional writing is not much better. You can freelance and get a word rate, averaging around P1.5k-P2.5k per article for magazines from the Summit Group, or be employed by a company with copy requirements for around P15k-P20k. Pure creative writers who dream of living off publishing royalties in the Philippines have to produce a large number of best-selling books in a short span of time, in an industry where print runs are generally 1,000 copies (with big print runs at around 10,000 copies).

The tech industry had its heyday with the bubble of irrational exuberance. At one point in time, designers could command up to P60k, with managerial salaries over P100k. Those days, of course, are gone, with a few sterling exceptions.

Advertising and marketing companies exist in an odd space. On one hand, if you are a creative, you are pretty much taken care of. If you consistently do good work and bring in awards, your pay will grow as you climb up the pyramid, earning anywhere from P30k to P80k and even higher. However, in the same industry, rank and file (and account executives) operate along the same low pay level: start at around P8k and progress to the twenties.

Creatives also do well in similar industries (acting, directing, production). Actors can do TV series and get around P50k per episode or do TV guesting at around P10k to 15k (they get bigger paychecks with films). TV advertising directors can make from P80k upwards. MTV directors can charge along P100k+, depending on the producers -- but if you're new and unheard of, chances are you'll be doing it for much much less, if you're tasked to do it at all. Composers begin at around P30k for a jingle if you're friends. Food stylists can make a killing, given the fact that so few of high caliber exist -- they charge P7.5k-P25k per plate (per layout). While starting photographers make around P5k-P10k per shoot, big name photographers play at P150k+ per day (there's also cutthroat competition for the wedding market).

For me though, nothing beats having your own business. The risks and headaches are terrifying, but everything balances out. Your small business can grow and take care of your future. Owners of restos, retail stores and other small businesses can pay themselves what their books can afford.

At a recent job fair, the organizers were forced to extend their hours and days to accommodate the thousands of people looking for work. Growing unemployment is a reality, with thousands of new graduates joining the ranks of the jobless every year. Openings are biased towards those who matriculated from the "top" schools: UP, Ateneo and La Salle. But having a diploma from those schools is not a guarantee of a job, much less good pay.

What does all this mean? When my daughter is of the appropriate age for such things, I will tell her: (1) Whatever you choose to be, make sure you like it. Find a job that fits you or, if it does not exist, create it. Follow your bliss but manage your own expectations. (2) You do not have to be a doctor or a lawyer or a corporate person to be comfortable. Define what makes you comfortable and work to achieve it. Do not buy in the previous generations' flawed reasoning spawned by the need for social positioning. (3) Do not undervalue your creative abilities. Contrary to what I was taught to believe in, words or a good eye for beauty CAN feed you. Develop your skill sets in language, writing, art and similar lines. (4) Look at starting a business. Even if, like me, you don't think you’re a businessman, you could be surprised. (5) The good life isn't about money, so that shouldn't be your number one priority. But if you want to be able to travel around Europe, barefoot and carefree for three years, you need to be able to pay for it. (6) Abolish the notion of job hierarchy from your mind. As long the people holding jobs maintain their values and principles, no one job is intrinsically superior to the next. Apart from that, I really don't know.

And Paolo writes:

Yes, 'tis the season to be Starstruck once more. It was only a few months back when Anj was convincing us all to go to Broadway Centrum for the first Starstruck. During its first weeks it had no audience and they had to pay people fifty pesos to watch it. Then they stopped paying the audience because soon fans clubs emerged and the lines were so long they had to tighten security.

Now, Piercing Pens observes that many teenagers are desperate to dream, believe and survive to be the next generation of Filipino superstars. These past few years, their ambition in life has shifted from becoming astronauts, engineers and doctors to becoming caregivers and cultural entertainers overseas. Now they hope to be movie and television stars, veejays and noontime show hosts. As Rolando B. Tolentino put it clearly during a symposium where we were both speakers. There's a shift from intellectual investment (puhunan) that one gets from proper schooling and education to a more physical puhunan: one's looks, body and manual labor over one's intelligence and wealth of knowledge. The example he cited was Hero Angeles from the star search show from the rival network. A UP student, Angeles didn't rely on his education but banked on his physical appearance that now guarantees him better financial gain and puts him in a better social position. If land was a sign of power during our Spanish colonial past, then education during our American colonial period, now it is the body that is used as capital. This all ties up with Tolentino's theory of the Philippines as a sexualized nation, where the only thing maybe preventing our economy from collapsing are the remittances from the overseas Filipino workers, most of them using their bodies in service-oriented or manual work.

It's a lack of faith in the Philippine educational system, especially when a college degree from a Filipino school or university fails to secure a career with better pay and better living conditions. So many unemployed college graduates find themselves accepting call center and other outsource labor jobs from multinational companies that it seems to be an undergrad's rite of passage. Either after graduation or a few semesters before graduation, a student (from these exclusive schools and prime universities in Metro Manila) finds he or she has to get this outsourcing job, part time at first then slowly, slowly after so many class sessions are missed, completely leaving school and then living the night shift or that of a contractual worker just to get some financial advancement.

And what's better than answering calls and troubleshooting during those harrowing hours of the graveyard shift? Superstardom. After all, the only requirements seem to be that you have to be young, willing and be present. No talent, no experience necessary as long as you have an image that can be worked on by a good PR team. If fortunate, success and upper social mobility happen immediately. If not, oh well ... at least you had your fifteen minutes of fame.

So who needs school? And who wants to work in cubicles with a faux American or English accent, or clean as you go as a service crew in fastfoods when you can be the next packaged image for a whole new generation to adore. And then someday ... politics!

All I can do is nod, and sigh a very troubled sigh.

1:04 AM | The Grim Sign of Troubled Days

Over dinner at Little Asia along Tomas Morato (selected by our youngest gourmand Ralph for their delectable Boneless Tilapia in Honey-Mayo Sauce), the gang and I engaged in talk about jobs like the old farts that some of us are becoming.

I grew up during the time when, when thinking about a stable future for their children, parents would insist on a certain hierarchy of professions. Tier One: Doctor, Lawyer; Tier Two: Architect, Engineer, and so on. It was drummed into my head that these were the jobs that guaranteed financial independence and a good life, along with respectability and a very high position in the social strata.

In fact, I was so brainwashed by their conviction that I moved through my formative years convinced that I needed to be a doctor or a lawyer. Nothing else would do. My little talent with words was considered of interest but of no real import or relevance to real life. When I applied for college, I landed a pre-med quota course at UP Diliman, which would enable me to make my final choice between law and medicine. Later, I came to my senses when my unhappiness became too much to bear and I abandoned the prescribed path, stunning my three parents (my mother and stepfather called in my biological father from the US so they could triple play me). My final choice was to go where my heart led me, and they all forecast doom, misery and inevitable poverty.

A few days ago, I began to gather information on how well these high priority professions pay.

I encountered an architect who works for a small firm with competitive pay. Only a few years younger than myself, he had the title of Senior Architect. His monthly salary is just around the same amount a fresh graduate working in a call center would make. Starting architects make as much as I would pay a Junior Designer in my own company.

With doctors, you need to be very well-connected or wealthy in the first place. For example, to have a clinic in the new hospital along Ortigas, you need to plunk down P10 million, in addition to other expenses. Or you work as an employee for a company like Clinica Manila with a stunningly low monthly wage augmented by your P300 consultation fees. Or even worse, you can work for the small derma clinics and make much less.

With law, unless you're into Tax Law or Corporate Law, your monthly take-home for the many rungs of the ladder is nowhere near the promised bonanza. I know of a trial lawyer who struggles to make ends meet: his salary is barely enough to support himself, his wife, two children and payments on their home. Unless you create a niche like my brother, it's going to be long and hard road.

It is not much different for other professions. For example, a new policeman makes around P12k a month, with incremental raises as they get promotions, all the way to the rank of Director which makes around P40k.

A manager at a resto chain makes around P15k, while it is minimum wage for staff-level positions and their equivalents (salesgirls, promofolk, waiters, and the like).

Insurance promises gigantic windfalls if you are a killer salesperson with incredible connections. Then you get to drive around in a Jaguar. Otherwise, you experience life in feast-or-famine mode.

Teachers continue to get underpaid compared to the private sector. You can spend years as a consultant in consultancy firms at around P12k-P15k. Think your MBA can help you? At one point in time, a brilliant acquaintance of mine with an MBA from the requisite impressive US school was making around P30k. Another MBA holder is currently jobless and is willing to work for peanuts.

Professional writing is not much better. You can freelance and get a word rate, averaging around P1.5k-P2.5k per article for magazines from the Summit Group, or be employed by a company with copy requirements for around P15k-P20k. Pure creative writers who dream of living off publishing royalties in the Philippines have to produce a large number of best-selling books in a short span of time, in an industry where print runs are generally 1,000 copies (with big print runs at around 10,000 copies).

The tech industry had its heyday with the bubble of irrational exuberance. At one point in time, designers could command up to P60k, with managerial salaries over P100k. Those days, of course, are gone, with a few sterling exceptions.

Advertising and marketing companies exist in an odd space. On one hand, if you are a creative, you are pretty much taken care of. If you consistently do good work and bring in awards, your pay will grow as you climb up the pyramid, earning anywhere from P30k to P80k and even higher. However, in the same industry, rank and file (and account executives) operate along the same low pay level: start at around P8k and progress to the twenties.

Creatives also do well in similar industries (acting, directing, production). Actors can do TV series and get around P50k per episode or do TV guesting at around P10k to 15k (they get bigger paychecks with films). TV advertising directors can make from P80k upwards. MTV directors can charge along P100k+, depending on the producers -- but if you're new and unheard of, chances are you'll be doing it for much much less, if you're tasked to do it at all. Composers begin at around P30k for a jingle if you're friends. Food stylists can make a killing, given the fact that so few of high caliber exist -- they charge P7.5k-P25k per plate (per layout). While starting photographers make around P5k-P10k per shoot, big name photographers play at P150k+ per day (there's also cutthroat competition for the wedding market).

For me though, nothing beats having your own business. The risks and headaches are terrifying, but everything balances out. Your small business can grow and take care of your future. Owners of restos, retail stores and other small businesses can pay themselves what their books can afford.

At a recent job fair, the organizers were forced to extend their hours and days to accommodate the thousands of people looking for work. Growing unemployment is a reality, with thousands of new graduates joining the ranks of the jobless every year. Openings are biased towards those who matriculated from the "top" schools: UP, Ateneo and La Salle. But having a diploma from those schools is not a guarantee of a job, much less good pay.

What does all this mean? When my daughter is of the appropriate age for such things, I will tell her: (1) Whatever you choose to be, make sure you like it. Find a job that fits you or, if it does not exist, create it. Follow your bliss but manage your own expectations. (2) You do not have to be a doctor or a lawyer or a corporate person to be comfortable. Define what makes you comfortable and work to achieve it. Do not buy in the previous generations' flawed reasoning spawned by the need for social positioning. (3) Do not undervalue your creative abilities. Contrary to what I was taught to believe in, words or a good eye for beauty CAN feed you. Develop your skill sets in language, writing, art and similar lines. (4) Look at starting a business. Even if, like me, you don't think you’re a businessman, you could be surprised. (5) The good life isn't about money, so that shouldn't be your number one priority. But if you want to be able to travel around Europe, barefoot and carefree for three years, you need to be able to pay for it. (6) Abolish the notion of job hierarchy from your mind. As long the people holding jobs maintain their values and principles, no one job is intrinsically superior to the next. Apart from that, I really don't know.

And Paolo writes:

Yes, 'tis the season to be Starstruck once more. It was only a few months back when Anj was convincing us all to go to Broadway Centrum for the first Starstruck. During its first weeks it had no audience and they had to pay people fifty pesos to watch it. Then they stopped paying the audience because soon fans clubs emerged and the lines were so long they had to tighten security.

Now, Piercing Pens observes that many teenagers are desperate to dream, believe and survive to be the next generation of Filipino superstars. These past few years, their ambition in life has shifted from becoming astronauts, engineers and doctors to becoming caregivers and cultural entertainers overseas. Now they hope to be movie and television stars, veejays and noontime show hosts. As Rolando B. Tolentino put it clearly during a symposium where we were both speakers. There's a shift from intellectual investment (puhunan) that one gets from proper schooling and education to a more physical puhunan: one's looks, body and manual labor over one's intelligence and wealth of knowledge. The example he cited was Hero Angeles from the star search show from the rival network. A UP student, Angeles didn't rely on his education but banked on his physical appearance that now guarantees him better financial gain and puts him in a better social position. If land was a sign of power during our Spanish colonial past, then education during our American colonial period, now it is the body that is used as capital. This all ties up with Tolentino's theory of the Philippines as a sexualized nation, where the only thing maybe preventing our economy from collapsing are the remittances from the overseas Filipino workers, most of them using their bodies in service-oriented or manual work.

It's a lack of faith in the Philippine educational system, especially when a college degree from a Filipino school or university fails to secure a career with better pay and better living conditions. So many unemployed college graduates find themselves accepting call center and other outsource labor jobs from multinational companies that it seems to be an undergrad's rite of passage. Either after graduation or a few semesters before graduation, a student (from these exclusive schools and prime universities in Metro Manila) finds he or she has to get this outsourcing job, part time at first then slowly, slowly after so many class sessions are missed, completely leaving school and then living the night shift or that of a contractual worker just to get some financial advancement.

And what's better than answering calls and troubleshooting during those harrowing hours of the graveyard shift? Superstardom. After all, the only requirements seem to be that you have to be young, willing and be present. No talent, no experience necessary as long as you have an image that can be worked on by a good PR team. If fortunate, success and upper social mobility happen immediately. If not, oh well ... at least you had your fifteen minutes of fame.

So who needs school? And who wants to work in cubicles with a faux American or English accent, or clean as you go as a service crew in fastfoods when you can be the next packaged image for a whole new generation to adore. And then someday ... politics!

All I can do is nod, and sigh a very troubled sigh.

Friday, September 17, 2004

7:15 PM | Flowers

I think I'm buying flowers for the pad tomorrow, and for mom when I visit her on Sunday. What the hey... anything to make me feel good. Flowers in the room are always nice.

7:15 PM | Flowers

I think I'm buying flowers for the pad tomorrow, and for mom when I visit her on Sunday. What the hey... anything to make me feel good. Flowers in the room are always nice.

7:15 PM | Flowers

I think I'm buying flowers for the pad tomorrow, and for mom when I visit her on Sunday. What the hey... anything to make me feel good. Flowers in the room are always nice.

6:13 PM | Bored, and Some Other Things

Sometimes, when you have a public blog, you have to know which things to keep out, and which things to keep in.

-- Anonymous Blogger

But who really gives a shit? I want to feel naked to the world. My life has always been an open book anyway. And generally, bloggers tend to post their most searing epiphanies and emotional battle scars online (see Wanggo Gallaga's exquisite rants in The Flight of the Rocketman), while strangely keeping happy moments off the Net. My Chesire Cat of Connect the Dots, for example, has yet to blog about her Palanca Award for her poetry. We had a nice exchange via text messaging the other weekend about her burgundy dress for the bash at the Manila Pen, but I still want something longish to chronicle her experience during the awards night. So far, wala pa. I texted her about it, and she says she's too busy living in the real world. Why is that always the case? Same with me, as well. I tend not to post when something really important happens. But when I'm bored, hello Blogger, here I come.

Which is really a nice segue to say what I really want to say: I am so fucking bored. I am so bored I'm like one of those Energizer bunnies, but this time in need of new batteries. I'm still banging those damn cymbals, ever so slowly now, but I need juice.

So, of course, you might be wondering why I said, just the other day, that I felt strangely happy. Blame Debarge. And Bubu's birthday. (We celebrated his birthday over dinner somewhere nice -- but he was nursing a terrible cold, so it wasn't quite as romantic as I would have wanted it to be.) Pero cute naman when you're taking care of your S.O., no? My maternal instincts took over last night while we were trying to go to sleep and he was sniffling like there was no tomorrow, and it was nice in a weird, caregiver kind of way.

My mood for the past few weeks, though, ever since I turned 28 (again), has generally been sour. Internally, that is. To the rest of the world, I am soooo sunny, I could kill myself.

"Hala, si Ian, angst-ridden na naman," you might say. "How retro."

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to dig up my old VHS copies of Ben Stiller's Reality Bites and Cameron Crowe's Singles, and mope ... beautifully.

The truth: I don't know what to do anymore. I'm in a limbo. I'm listless, and I've been spending way too much time in bed when I should be doing something worthwhile, like painting, or taking up photography again, or directing a play, or writing. Or formulating escape plans to get away from this slowly-imploding, God-forsaken country. But no... I have surrendered to hopeless routine instead. My classes this semester have generally been uninspired, because most of the good students already enrolled last summer, and I'm left with the boring ones. (I would know. I was the summer literature teacher. And I had a great time teaching those summer kids. That's why I love summer classes. They're always a booster to my academic juice. First semesters, on the other hand, have always been downers.)

I haven't written anything worthwhile for more than a year now. I tried my hand at science fiction -- about how, in the future, they cloned Rizal from a tuff of his hair hidden away in that lamparilla of his which one of his sisters stole away during the hero's last day in Intramuros; only to find out that the cloned Rizal was, in fact, a woman -- but the finished draft is flat and uninspired. I have a thousand ideas in my head, but I'm always tired to even contemplate sitting down and developing any of them. I am always tired these days, saddles with the baggage of expectations. There seems to be no time at all to be creative. All of my energies have been focused on studies, and work, and M. And then all I really do is watch Oprah and Amazing Race and Blind Date and Sex and the City ... I feel I don't own my life anymore. I feel divorced from my reality, and my old aspirations.

(Sighing dramatically.)

There's a reason why I'm putting all of these delicate things down online. I've always believed that words have the power of exorcism. I'm writing all these down in my blog because I want to feek free of them in real life.

The other day, walking around Lee Super Plaza like a zombie, I decided to go to the Books Section, but discarded most of the things I saw. I have too many books at home already, I said. I can't be buying another one. But there was one book that caught my attention.

Brian Morton's Starting Out in the Evening. It feels good, this book. It's so sly in the way it makes you identify with the characters. The language is simple and, in a sense, elegant, and the prose occasional flares with beautiful insight. It makes me want to go back to writing again.

My only hope now is this rising tenderness in me, this slowly swirling desire to move. I'm taking deep breaths. I'm slowly getting excited to get up from my protracted bout of slothfulness. By God, I can do this. I can.

6:13 PM | Bored, and Some Other Things

6:13 PM | Bored, and Some Other Things

Thursday, September 16, 2004

11:01 AM | Rain is Orgasmic

I'm strangely happy today. Must have been the sporadic rain in Dumaguete lately. It has not rained in Dumaguete for quite some time -- a perplexing, dry extension of summer. Whenever I turned on the TV for news and I'd hear about the floods in China, the gales over Manila, the hurricane havoc over Florida and the Carribean, I'd ask myself: Rain, what rain? The last time there was a typhoon in Dumaguete was in 1993 or thereabouts. That one came with such viciousness, but the people of Dumagueute -- unsure over what to do in such circumstances -- just went about their day like it was just another day. I went to the movies that day, for example, and saw Rob Reiner's When Harry Met Sally...in Ever Theater. In the darkness of the theater, I found my brothers and their barkada, too, eating popcorn and throwing kernels at the screen. On the way home on a lazy pedicab, the wind was pulling out everything. Trees were flying about, and what-not. The pedicab driver and I were looking around, bemused. How cute, I said.

That was what I said, too, when I went to Manila last year for the Palanca, and another hurricane was making Manila a Third World version of Venice. I remember I was stuck in a taxicab on the way to my hotel from the airport, and flood water was all around us. I could hear the water lapping at the bottom of the car. I told myself, Hala, parang boat ang taxi! and beamed. It was just so cute.

That's me, Dumaguete Boy. Knows only summer all year around.

But the rain is starting to come back naman, mostly at night when everybody else has gone to bed. Except for an insomniac like me. The pitter-patter last night was cold comfort. I love the rain. This morning, when I woke up, I felt refreshed. I was smiling.

Or maybe I feel good because I woke up to the sound of Debarge's Who's Holding Donna Now filling the entire apartment. No better morning music than this 80's hit. My bubu was dancing about the pad, naked, lip-synching to the song.

Give him that, I said to myself, smiling. Today is his birthday after all.

Happy Birthday, M. Trust me, being 21 is orgasmic.

11:01 AM | Rain is Orgasmic

10:42 AM | Poor Americans...

Ain't this the truth? For a clearer picture of things, click here.

[via calvin wetzel]

10:42 AM | Poor Americans...

Ain't this the truth? For a clearer picture of things, click here.

[via calvin wetzel]

10:42 AM | Poor Americans...

Ain't this the truth? For a clearer picture of things, click here.

[via calvin wetzel]

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

1:27 PM | Bunny Horror

The Exorcist! The Shining! Titanic! Alien! Jaws! Played by bunnies! This has got to be the funniest find I've had in the Net in a long, long time.

1:27 PM | Bunny Horror

The Exorcist! The Shining! Titanic! Alien! Jaws! Played by bunnies! This has got to be the funniest find I've had in the Net in a long, long time.

1:27 PM | Bunny Horror

The Exorcist! The Shining! Titanic! Alien! Jaws! Played by bunnies! This has got to be the funniest find I've had in the Net in a long, long time.

1:10 PM | Top 10 Christian Break-up Lines

1. "I'm sorry, I've found someone more spiritual."

2. "I'm sorry, it's just not God's will."

3. "I feel called to the ministry -- very soon and very far from you as soon as possible."

4. "I'm sorry, it could never work. I'm a sanguine and you're a phlegmatic."

5. "God loves me and must have a better plan for my life."

6. "You know, I feel like I'm dating my brother."

7. "At least I got a lot out of our Bible studies together."

8. "You need someone with lower standards."

9. "I think we should just be prayer partners."

10. "I do love you, but it's just agape now"

1:10 PM | Top 10 Christian Break-up Lines

Sunday, September 12, 2004

11:17 PM | See, Kakay? I Told You We'd Make It

One year...

11:17 PM | See, Kakay? I Told You We'd Make It

One year...

11:17 PM | See, Kakay? I Told You We'd Make It

One year...

Friday, September 10, 2004

8:32 PM | Another National Book Award Controversy

This is another National Book Award-related "question mark," something I broached to my Philippine literature class the other day when we were discussing Philippine graphic literature. The class was giving comments about Gerry Alanguilan's Wasted, when I told them that the Darna comics I had shown them earlier (and which I had proclaimed as something ho-hum) had just won the National Book Award, tying with the Vic Simbulan and Dean Alfar-edited graphic anthology Siglo: Freedom.

Luis Joaquin Katigbak says, "This seems to be the year for questioning the Manila Critics Circle's relevance and decision-making process, as the questionable verdicts aren't limited to the Young Adult category. I for one was aghast that they would award anything to Mango Comics' Darna, which was mediocre at best. That it should tie with Siglo just makes my brain want to commit hara-kiri, because what standards are they using?"

Later, he says: "Of course, one can argue that Siglo has its own flaws, but its ambition, its scope, its willingness to reach for and achieve more than your run-of-the-mill slab of sequential lit -- these are undeniable. Meanwhile, Darna offers stilted writing, hackneyed superheroics, and gratuitous T&A, which can hardly be deemed an accomplishment, much less award-worthy. Amidst the flurry of congratulations from the local comics mailing lists and weblogs, very few people have chosen to express concern -- at least in writing -- about the discrepancy in quality between the two supposed winners. Hey, we're Pinoys. We're like that. But if word of mouth is anything to go by, I'm far from the only person disturbed by this decision. I'm not looking to diss Mango Comics as a company -- I am very much looking forward to future releases from them, from talents such as Gerry Alanguilan and Arnold Arre (and besides, it seems that so many of my friends work for Mango these days) -- but hey, bad comics are bad comics. To pretend otherwise is to be stupid."

My friend Shirley nods, and says, "And hey, with those boobs, how can this Darna fly?"

"Yeah," Luis adds, "I don't think breasts the size of one's head help make one aerodynamic. ;p Adam's theory is that the prize is really for Mars Ravelo, the original creator. If that's the case, they might as well just award some lifetime achievement type thing, and not honor the substandard 'update'."

Right.

Meanwhile, Angas ng Kurimaw rants about Krip Yuson ...

8:32 PM | Another National Book Award Controversy

8:32 PM | Another National Book Award Controversy

Monday, September 06, 2004

10:41 PM | Shut Up Already About Bad Chick Lit

When my friend the writer Sheryll Tesch was depressed after a terrible break-up, I bought her Summit Books's The Breakup Diaries by Maya O. Calico. That cheered her up.

What I'm really trying to say is: I like Summit Books. They're not for everybody (one acquaintance called the covers "a neon candy attack"), but I like them. They're good reading. Light, yes, but never stupid. The list of writers are impressive, too -- a virtual who's who of today's top fictionists: Tara Sering, Mabi David, Abi Aquino, and Andrea Pasion.

Besides, debates on what's literary or not are always arbitrary. Fun and passionate, of course, and good for dinner conversation ... but should always be taken with a grain of salt.

So, what's the current brouhaha all about? Here's a map of the current literary "controversary" in Philippine literary circles:

First, the Manila Critics Circle gives the Best YA Literature National Book Award to Tara Sering's Almost Married.

Children's literature writer Carla Pacis questions the move, and sends out emails to various literary friends about it. Chick Lit is not literature, she says, and Almost Married is certainly not a YA novel.

Later, Krip Yuson -- who's part of the Manila Critics Circle -- highlights the concern in his column for the Philippine Star. Mae Astrid Tobias declares his "point well taken" is not an answer, and considers Isagani C. Cruz's (another member of the Circle) comments about the award.

An incensed Lilledeshan Bose puts her two cents in, and proclaims Tara the savior of Philippine Literature. And later, this.

Soon the other blogs take over. Here's Paolo Manalo. Here's Juan Miguel Alegre. Here's somebody named Ursula Lear.

Who knows where this thread will lead to?

And then, for another Manila Critics Circle-connected brouhaha, here's a certain Diwata Nakpil on the choice of Angelo Suarez's The Nymph of MTV as National Book Awardee for Poetry.

Me? I'm just glad people -- ordinary people, and not just the literati -- are talking. Maybe Philippine literature is not dead at all.

10:41 PM | Shut Up Already About Bad Chick Lit

Friday, September 03, 2004

1:09 AM | Doubt

I finally got to watch Cris Pablo's acclaimed (and quite infamous) Duda, which appears to be the first Filipino digital film about gay and lesbian life in the Philippines. I was blown away by Andoy Ranay's very subtle (and effective) performance as a pining (and whining?) lover, but not so much for the ungainly script which just went on and on and on ... Pablo's characters are unfortunately undeveloped. And the amateur aspects of the production sometimes threaten to overwhelm our interest in the story. But I really don't want to complain.

I like the film.

I love its bravery and courage, and I love its pioneering feel. Not a lot of mainstream entertainment give a good, unbiased look on the lives of queer men and women in this country. ABS-CBN, for example, is known for putting a spin on stereotypes of the community, making monkeys of us all. (Remember all those news exposes about "immoral" gay life, which basically serve to titillate a homophobic, albeit homo-interested, public? Gays news are always a ratings booster for TV Patrol. Remember Buttercup, and the dreadful gay portrayal by Onemig Bondoc?) Not this film. This has Pinoy Queer as Folk written all over it, and I'm happy for that. Now, if we could just buckle down and make a really good film about the way we truly live....

1:09 AM | Doubt

1:09 AM | Doubt

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Thursday, September 30, 2004

5:24 PM | One Particular Stupid, Ugly, Toady Freak

5:24 PM | One Particular Stupid, Ugly, Toady Freak

5:24 PM | One Particular Stupid, Ugly, Toady Freak

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

7:33 PM | A Break in Chris's Murder Case

7:33 PM | A Break in Chris's Murder Case

7:33 PM | A Break in Chris's Murder Case

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

3:53 PM | More Stupid, Ugly Freaks

3:53 PM | More Stupid, Ugly Freaks

3:53 PM | More Stupid, Ugly Freaks

1:28 AM | On Chris Abella

1:28 AM | On Chris Abella

1:28 AM | On Chris Abella

Monday, September 27, 2004

1:48 AM | More National Book Awards Brouhaha...

1:48 AM | More National Book Awards Brouhaha...

1:48 AM | More National Book Awards Brouhaha...

Sunday, September 26, 2004

10:05 AM | Out!

10:05 AM | Out!

10:05 AM | Out!

Saturday, September 25, 2004

7:13 PM | People Murder For This?

7:13 PM | People Murder For This?

7:13 PM | People Murder For This?

6:43 PM | Art in a Time of Terror

6:43 PM | Art in a Time of Terror

6:43 PM | Art in a Time of Terror

6:25 PM | Goodbye, Chris

6:25 PM | Goodbye, Chris

6:25 PM | Goodbye, Chris

Friday, September 24, 2004

11:29 PM | Stupid Freaks

11:29 PM | Stupid Freaks

11:29 PM | Stupid Freaks

Thursday, September 23, 2004

1:32 PM | Chris Needs Our Prayers!

1:32 PM | Chris Needs Our Prayers!

1:32 PM | Chris Needs Our Prayers!

3:07 AM | Literatura

3:07 AM | Literatura

3:07 AM | Literatura

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

10:55 AM | Hot Christian Romance

10:55 AM | Hot Christian Romance

10:55 AM | Hot Christian Romance

Monday, September 20, 2004

11:32 PM | Sabi ng student ko, "Who's Marshall? And why does he have a law?"

11:32 PM | Sabi ng student ko, "Who's Marshall? And why does he have a law?"

11:32 PM | Sabi ng student ko, "Who's Marshall? And why does he have a law?"

11:13 PM | Swiss Chocolate and Gmail Invites

11:13 PM | Swiss Chocolate and Gmail Invites

11:13 PM | Swiss Chocolate and Gmail Invites

8:02 AM | Why you shouldn't hate Marc Gaba.

8:02 AM | Why you shouldn't hate Marc Gaba.

8:02 AM | Why you shouldn't hate Marc Gaba.

Saturday, September 18, 2004

1:27 AM | eXperim[E]nto!

1:27 AM | eXperim[E]nto!

1:27 AM | eXperim[E]nto!

1:04 AM | The Grim Sign of Troubled Days

1:04 AM | The Grim Sign of Troubled Days

1:04 AM | The Grim Sign of Troubled Days

Friday, September 17, 2004

7:15 PM | Flowers

7:15 PM | Flowers

7:15 PM | Flowers

6:13 PM | Bored, and Some Other Things