Monday, November 20, 2017
2:10 AM |
A Review of 'Don't Tell Anyone'
Patrick Limcaco of Pat Sessions reviews Don’t Tell Anyone: Literary Smut, and has wonderful recommendations. Link here. Thank you for reading, Patrick!
Labels: books, erotica, philippine literature, queer, review, sex, writers
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Sunday, November 19, 2017
9:00 AM |
A Map of Heritage
Most of us rush past the
campanario—or the iconic belltower of Dumaguete—in our pursuit of daily lives barely registering its presence, despite its history or its height: familiarity blinds us to things, which explains everything, and that is perfectly understandable.
But we know it’s there when we care to. We know it is the city’s ultimate landmark when we are pushed for more opinion about it. And when some tourist would insist for a story, we could give the basic outline of it being a watchtower in the olden days, when the people of Dumaguete paid vigil over the seas in a constant lookout for pirates from down south who had a propensity for pillage. “That’s where we got our name for the place,” we say, as if from a script, “from the word ‘daguit,’ which means ‘to kidnap,’ because these pirates regularly came to pillage the village.”
Which is fine enough as tidbit of history—but it is a narrative that erases much of the nuances of history, because incomplete. And incomplete because forgotten.
For one thing, there wasn’t just one watchtower. There were four.
When Father Jose Manuel Fernandez de Septien began building the Dumaguete
convento between 1755 and 1760, he also built these four watchtowers, each mounted with cannons, to guard against the aforementioned invading pirates—and Fr. Septien guaranteed, for a time, a village that was largely spared the mayhem that attended many Visayan shore towns in the 17th and 18h centuries.
The first of these four watchtowers would be at the corner of Bishop Epifanio Surban St. and Perdices St. [where the Bank of Philippine Islands is located]. The second would be at the corner of Surban St. and Katada St. [the rear corner of COSCA]. The third would be at the corner of Katada St. and Colon St. [the corner of the fish terminal]. (Katada St. is the narrow byway that traverses what we call the painitan.) And the fourth, and the only surviving watchtower, would be the current campanario, which was actually built much, much later by one Father Juan Felix de la Encarnacion upon the ruins of the original Septien watchtower.
From his research on local parish history, Fr. Roman Sagun writes: “With certainty, Fr. Septien must have had the nerves of steel. One can just imagine how in those times, and with so meager sources at hand, he was able to accomplish numerous projects with such tenacity. The massive stone church, which still stands today, is due to his great labors, though its transepts were developed at a later time. The
convento was built from choice strong materials, which covered even the rear portion. This edifice, in which remnants of warfare can still be found in its original doorway, was constructed like a strong fort and ensured safety from any attack by the Moros. It was also fortified by a wall over two meters in height from the outside, forming a large square in the center of which the church and the
convento were situated; there was also a large plaza where the inhabitants could take refuge in times of necessity … In addition to this arrangement, there was a
contravalla, another defense perimeter walling of a smaller size than the former whose remains can still to be found here and there. Aside from constructing the church, the
convento, the fortress, the watchtowers, and the
contravalla, Father Septien also built bulwarks which were located at strategic positions on the beachfront of Dumaguete. All these were made of stone and were well secured, and they were utilized to keep watch on the coast and prevent any surprise Moro attack.”
Nobody, save local historians, remember Fr. Septien, practically the architect of what we now know of Dumaguete. We don’t even have a picture of him, and much of his life remain a mystery, unresearched. Like the three other watchtowers, he has become lost to us, forgotten.
The human mind, even at the best of times, tends towards forgetting. It is a fact of frailty that’s perfectly understandable: our lives are finite and short, while the world is vast and history is long, and we only have the vessel of our puny lives to witness that vastness, that immense length. Thus we have evolved to create memorials and museums—institutionalized memory markers—to remind us that our present is not all there is, that it is in fact the sum of the accumulation of years and experience.
Heritage is the word for that.
It is, to borrow one popular definition, “anything of value from the past that provides identity to the present and inspires the future generation.” Heritage is significant not only in terms of historical importance, but also architectural, aesthetic, spiritual, and social. Its value transcends and includes many levels, even the economic—and proper heritage management can only be good for any community, establishing not only a sense of identity, but also marking potential economic boon. Think of Vigan and its Spanish colonial houses. Think of Banawe and its rice terraces. Think of Bohol and its chocolate hills.
Traditionally, heritage can be classified into five distinct categories: movable heritage, intangible heritage, natural heritage, built heritage, and creative industries. These categories allow not only mere classification of heritage items, but also a key to what we call “cultural mapping.” Cultural mapping is, as the popular definition goes, “a process of identifying cultural heritage resources of a specific locality for purposes of conservation and development, and enables the community to understand and share culture, to re-think history, and finally to promote creativity and development.” A good program of cultural mapping will ultimately have three specific objectives: first, to identify distinct heritage resources of a community vis a vis another community; second, to thoroughly understand and properly record a heritage resource for future reference; and third, to generate interest on heritage resources among users and non users of heritage.
What are examples of “movable heritage”? Paintings and other artworks, documents, books, photos and memorabilia, costumes, crafts, weaponry, furniture, equipment and machinery and work implements, and musical instruments. Even religious groups and personalities.
“Intangible heritage” would include language, local festivals, songs and assorted local music, dance, poetry and assorted local literature, local technology, local sports and games, culinary arts, local jokes, rituals and belief practices, healing arts, and secret local knowledge.
“Built heritage” would include ancestral houses, churches and mosques, plazas and park, schools and government buildings, local marketplaces, bridges, and streets and roads.
“Natural heritage” would include endemic plants and animals, rocks and minerals, forests, lakes, rivers, falls, mountains and volcanoes, valleys, caves, beaches, rice fields, and underwater resources.
“Creative industries and occupations” would include architecture, crafts industry, furniture design, fashion designer, general design industry, advertising, visual arts scene, live and recorded music industry, writing and publishing, performing arts and related entertainment, film and video production, TV, radio, and internet broadcasting, and software and computer games development.
All of these is culture, is heritage—and one can see how vital they are in the making of a community, even of sustaining it. Mapping these is indeed what Dessa Quesada-Palm has described as “a valuable tool for identifying a community’s strengths and its resources,” because it allows identification, and with that comes assessment—Why is it important to us? How do we maximize its potential? What is its current condition, and what can be done to make it better?
We ask, for example: what is the common image we use to promote Dumaguete?
The
campanario is a ready answer, because it’s there, and we are vaguely aware of a history. It is our icon for a city that endures. But it is in a frail condition, and it has been dwarfed by an ugly and ill-advised towering addition to the adjacent convent, and the infrastructure that surrounds it diminishes its beauty. Noting these, its future can be mapped out, and proper development can follow, and we not only become instrumental to preserving heritage, we open a way for the community to maximize the draw the
campanario holds.
Mapping heritage is a way to forestall forgetting.
Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, heritage, history, negros
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Monday, November 13, 2017
1:05 AM |
Death and Life
This is Margalit Fox, staff writer for
The New York Times, who writes obits for the paper. She is my favorite talking head in Vanessa Gould's documentary
Obit (2016), her feature film debut on obituary writing.
[Aside #1: Gould first impressed me with her short subject documentary
Between the Folds, which was about the art of paper-folding, an engrossing film.]
[Aside #2: I love the obituaries of the
New York Times; have been a fan of the section for years. They're such compelling essays, and I always seek them out when a favorite person of mine -- a writer, an actor, etc. -- dies.]
I love Fox in the film because she gives the most rounded insights, like: "It's counterintuitive, perhaps, but obituaries have next to nothing to do with death and absolutely everything to do with life." How do you make a documentary about death fun and compelling? Gould found a way: celebrate life.
Labels: death, documentaries, film, journalism, obituary, writing
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Sunday, November 12, 2017
9:00 AM |
The Value of Culture in the Development of Dumaguete
Early this year, the effort to establish local councils in Dumaguete that would spearhead policy with an eye towards heritage and art and culture, began with a simple meeting of individuals tasked to do a quick cultural mapping of Dumaguete. Its facilitator was Dessa Quesada-Palm, working with City Tourism Officer Jacqueline Veloso-Antonio—and the people they gathered were representatives of the arts, cultural organizations, journalism, sports, business, academia, and others.
We were tasked to give initial insights that Dumaguete could use as impetus to make culture and heritage be part of its blueprint for development in the coming years.
In that meeting, Dessa briefed us about the need to set parameters for culture in the name of national, not just local, development: “A couple of years ago, the National Commission for Culture and the Arts set out to ask a very brave question: how can one really say that art and culture has helped economic goals, poverty alleviation, disaster risk management, and others?”
Indeed, what has arts and culture done so far for social development?
These questions needed asking, not because they are fair questions—they aren’t—but because they embody the general dismissiveness that artists and cultural workers regularly get when held up to proclaim measurable contributions to community well-being. This dismissiveness take on many forms: among them, the slashing of public endowment for art programs, the gradual disappearance of music and fine arts in school curriculum [in my high school days, music was folded into one subject that included physical education and health], the destruction of heritage architecture to make way for parking lots, the quizzical looks that students in music, fine arts, and creative writing get when they announce their majors and are then asked: “How is that practical?”
Never mind the studies that actually suggest that discipline in the humanities make fields steeped in STEM more competitive [the Apple story is the best example], or urban design observations that communities that embrace artists are more thriving and make for good economic indicators.
“The bottom line here, whatever it is that was identified by NCCA as relevant,” Dessa told us, “it needed
indicators.”
Indicators are benchmarks we could measure the value of things that are often intangible, and this includes culture.
The first focus could be an assessment about what it is in the local community that we have to celebrate—pertaining, of course, to its flagship cultural programs. In Dumaguete, you have Sandurot; Bayawan has Tawo-Tawo; Sibulan has Yagyag. This assessment is important because cultural celebrations cannot just be spun from nothingness; they need an anchor in community life and culture to make the celebration more authentic, more truly a reflection of the community story.
Cebu’s Sinulog gets its spark from the commemoration of the Sto. Nino story in its history and, together with Aklan’s Ati-Atihan Festival, set the blueprint for other festivals in the country to follow in the conception of their reasons for being. At the outset, the impetus from Cebu is a good one. But the drawback has proven to be this: the Sinulog model has ceased to become mere inspiration; instead its very rhythm has been copied wholesale by other festivals without organizers stopping to think,
what is the rhythm of my own place? It has become a practice for most festival performers to hire trainers from other places, like Cebu—and this affects the culture. This is why whenever you go to another city or town in the throes of carnival spirit, you get the same percussion beat, the same dance beats that you see performed in the streets of Cebu every January.
There is no value in being a copycat, and that includes socio-economic value. Which is why, for Dumaguete, we had to ask:
What is the Dumaguete story?
What is the rhythm of Dumaguete?
What is the inspiration of being a Dumaguete artist?
From the answers we hope to achieve, we can create a dance from the rhythm that is inspired by Dumaguete itself.
The second focus is on culture and heritage preservation and its link to risk-reduction management, environmental concerns, and socio-economic responsibilities and concerns.
What is the role of local artists and cultural workers in any of these?
And the answer is, truth to tell, simply this:
know yourself. The community must know itself thoroughly, and this includes, by and large, its culture and heritage. A community that has a complete map, a complete picture, of what makes it the vibrant community that it is, is indeed a community that can address properly its socio-economic concerns, its environmental concerns, and its risk management concerns.
A few snippets, among many, to illustrate:
When one goes to a
pasalubong shop in town, whether you are a tourist, or a native simply interested in sampling local goods, one should not only see on the shelves of these
pasalubong shops products that are ubiquitous everywhere else like Boracay; they must have Dumaguete products that can be really be called “Dumaguete’s own.” (But what do we exactly mean by “Dumaguete’s own”?)
When one buys a product made of
uway—and by doing so, one is convinced that he is doing his part to support local tradition and artisans—one might not immediately be aware that
uway has an endangered status, which might come as a shock to many, and thus its harvesting must be regulated. (What are other natural things that we have in our community that needs protecting?)
In a country that is in constant danger of typhoons and earthquakes, when one thinks of reducing risk, what constitutes the list that needs saving beyond people and livelihood, if saving a community also means saving the things that make it the community that it is?
According to the United Nations Office of Disaster Risk Reduction, risk-reduction management “aims to reduce the damage caused by natural hazards like earthquakes, floods, droughts and cyclones, through an ethic of prevention.” Accordingly, “disasters often follow natural hazards,” and a “disaster’s severity depends on how much impact a hazard has on society and the environment.”
This calls then for a mapping of the community’s heritage, which includes not only artistic effects or monuments, but also its natural heritage and creative industries. A cultural mapping is a process of identifying natural and cultural heritage resources of a specific locality for purposes of conservation and development, which then enables us to understand and share culture, to re-think history, and to promote creativity and development.
Only with this map can we consolidate a community’s identity and soul—what makes it tick—and from that can spring a plan for community development that is organic, that is reflective of community ideals, that is finally beneficial to all.
Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, heritage
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Wednesday, November 08, 2017
When I was a teenager [I remember high school*], I stammered a lot -- but only when I read in public. I couldn’t make out the words properly for some reason, and public reading became torture for me. It took some effort overcoming it: when I was alone, I’d read aloud and I’d be fine, and I kept at it, until the problem went away for the most part. (I still stammer when I am unprepared.) Today, every time I’m asked to speak in public, I do a ritual which I’ve carried over from my stammering years: I go to a private place -- a CR, for example -- and I’d repeat five times this tongue twister: “Betty bought a bit of butter, but Betty said, ‘This butter is bitter.’ So Betty bought a bit of better butter to make her bitter butter better.”
It works.
*A grade school classmate just informed me I also stammered way before that
Labels: life, memories
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3:16 PM |
"After all we're only ordinary men."
This feels like a Pink Floyd singing "Us and Them" kind of Wednesday.
Labels: life, music
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The perfect chair, I just learned from BBC's
The Genius of Design documentary series from 2010, is every ambitious designer's holy grail of design. My favorite is still the walnut lounge chair by Charles and Ray Eames from 1953. And my most hated -- because of its sheer banal ubiquity -- is the
poly chair variation of the monobloc plastic chair by Karim Rashid from 2003. This is what I do when I get insomnia: I watch films or read books about design or religion.
Labels: design
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Tuesday, November 07, 2017
10:46 PM |
On Watching Almereyda's Experimenter
Three things I pondered about while watching Michael Almereyda's
Experimenter (2015):
[1] There are films that strike one as cinematic essays. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's
Howl (2010) is really a dramatized demonstration of several approaches of literary criticism to the iconic Allen Ginsburg poem. In a similar stylistic vein, Almereyda's attempt is a fourth-wall breaking critical reassessment of social psychologist Stanley Milgram's contributions to the field, particularly his work on obedience and authority. Sometimes it doesn't work, sometimes it does. Both
Howl and
Experimenter work -- they come off as cool dramatizations of academic ideas, and we are enriched simply by just watching.
[2] How is it that in 2015, we got two cinematic takes on very famous psychological experiments on the banality of evil? [Hannah Arendt would have been interested.] There's this film, which takes a very deep look into the Milgram experiment [which posits that ordinary people will render evil acts as long as they are made to do so under authority of someone else; e.g., "I was just doing my job"]. Then there's Kyle Patrick Alvarez's
The Stanford Prison Experiment, a less successful film about the aborted psychological experiment of Philip Zimbardo on authority and incarceration [which demonstrated how ordinary people, when given the slightest power and authority over other people in a hierarchy, tend to abuse that power]. Both films in 2015! Did they anticipate the rise of Trump, Duterte, and other neo-despots that started to bedevil us in 2016?
[3] I miss Winona Ryder. She plays the minor role here of Mrs. Milgram, but she makes the most of it, lending the part a quiet but also quirky elegance.
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Monday, November 06, 2017
9:00 PM |
Reflections on Film Music
Listening to film soundtracks again. The musical scores, specifically. I haven’t done this in a while, years in fact. Here’s the great violinist Itzhak Perlman playing the theme from John William’s score for
Schindler's List. It’s impossible not to be moved by this. And yet, at the back of my head, I cannot help but think: Is it all right to swoon, to be so moved, by music that is, in reality, a dirge for six million dead?
* * *
The music of Rachel Portman is so underrated.
* * *
I am convinced Hans Zimmer’s “Time” from the score of
Inception is a musical piece of towering beauty. Seven years hence, it’s hypnotic hold remains, and relentlessly so. It starts quietly, like one settling to sleep, and in the course of unfolding, crescendos in echoes of the same musical beat -- but bigger, more urgent, like a dream that grows and grows. And then, just when you think there is no peak to this, just a continuation of unfettered dreamful longing, it settles back down again and dives into the simplicity of piano keys tinkling, a thread of violin to complete a sound of melancholy. And then it ends in a shattered note. Like one waking up, remembering the wisps of a dream, and stupefied by the bright morning sunlight greeting our waking eyes.
Labels: film, life, music
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Sunday, November 05, 2017
3:49 PM |
Calling Your Name
Back in 2011, the Filipino-American fictionist Veronica Montes sent me all the way from San Francisco, CA a copy of Andrew Aciman's
Call Me By Your Name. The book consumed me. The prose was deliciously overheated, but it was lyrical and perfectly evocative of the kind of loving and longing we all go through, and there was an incisive intelligence that pulsed in the narrative. I have been Elio. And I have been Oliver. The book stayed with me. In 2015, when I was writing "Compartments," first published in
Esquire Magazine in 2016 and now included in DON'T TELL ANYONE, I think Aciman's prose provided the emotional blueprint with which to tackle a difficult story.
Thank you, Ver, for the book!
Get Veronica Montes' latest collection of short stories, Benedicta Takes Wing
, here.Labels: books, queer, writers, writing
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8:00 AM |
Chasing Heritage
When Prudencio B. Sirilan passed away last October 18, he was 69 years old—and he would have passed on very quietly, remembered as loving father to his family and mentor to many, were it not for a quick notice that the Dumaguete City Tourism Office thought of posting in his remembrance on the day he died. Absent that, I suspect there would have been not much else, although it must be said that he was indeed a beloved figure. Perhaps his being an artist would be recalled by some friends, and the rest of Dumaguete would have moved on quickly, the way it usually does, comfortably ignorant of its history, of its shapers, of its heritage.
Prodi was the consummate cultural worker, and he had given so much of his life to the cultural development of Dumaguete City—and it is only right that we should remember him well. He was one of the original organizers of the city’s Sandurot Festival, conceptualizing the first ceremony in 1988 as a festival that would tell the story of Dumaguete and its people. That alone compels proper appreciation. It felt almost fitting—if we could say that—that he would choose to leave us at the height of this year’s iteration of the Buglasan, another festival he helped shape.
Today, Dumagueteños of course are familiar with Sandurot and Buglasan, but little remembrance is spared the inspired men and women who conceived of them. The truth may be that what they have created became bigger than them—as it should—which ensures an institution that belongs ultimately to local culture and tradition and not to specific names of people.
But I would have liked a memorial of some sort to carve in historical permanence their contributions to very specific heritage work. Thus far, however, Dumaguete as a city has no museums yet to showcase its culture and history, and there is almost an absence of research work and conservation efforts to properly showcase its heritage.
In 2012, when I was editing and putting together Handulanataw, the history of art of culture in Silliman University, that lack made itself profoundly apparent to me, and I finally confessed three years later of that frustration: “One of the things that constantly made my heart break was getting told that the art pieces and book collections and papers of cultural pioneers we were researching on were gone or were scattered to the proverbial wind: photographs destroyed by flood water, paintings burned and lost or stolen, papers eaten by termites, books relegated to dusty corners of stockrooms where they were being eaten by god-knows-what and pooped on by rats. I found old books owned by Albert Faurot that way. I asked for the manuscripts of one local playwright who had died many years back and was told by the family: ‘We burned them. We thought they were just trash.’ And Sendong, of course, destroyed many, many old photographs.”
I continued that confession with this observation: “I have to wonder how come no plucky young local historian is doing some initiative in scanning the old photographs of old families here in Negros Oriental? How come we don’t have a museum that would showcase the works of Jose Laspiñas and Francisco Verano, before they’re eaten away by more termites and neglect? How come no local theatre groups are producing the plays of Bobby Flores Villasis, Amiel Leonardia, Elsa Coscolluela, Ephraim Bejar, and Roberto J. Pontenila Jr.? How come we don’t make concerts of the music of Zoe Lopez and the collected Visayan folk songs of Priscilla Magdamo-Abraham?”
Of late, the digital absence of much of Dumaguete’s history and culture leaves a gaping maw that provides a sad answer to this revision of a popular existential question: “If you google something, and you come up with nothing, does it even exist?”
To test that, I googled “Jose Pro Teves,” Dumaguete’s longest-serving mayor, a politician beloved by generations of Dumagueteños, and instrumental in shaping much of the social infrastructure of this city. The hits in Google gave the most rudimentary returns, nothing at all substantial. I could get his birthdate, but the Internet did not even know when he died.
Everybody also knows about the campanario, the Dumaguete bell tower that has become the city’s enduring icon. But what about Don Jose Manuel Fernandez de Septien, the parish priest who was instrumental in building the Dumaguete convento and the original watchtowers, and Don Juan Felix de la Encarnacion, the parish priest who built the present campanario upon the ruins of one of Father Septien’s watchtowers? We don’t have pictures of them, and we don’t know much about them—although Father Roman Sagun, our indefatigable researcher of local parish history, does try to give what history he could find about them.
Things of late have been changing, of course. In 2017, after years and years of protracted planning and wishful thinking, we have finally created the City Heritage Council, under Dr. Earl Jude Cleope, and the City Art and Culture Council—and they definitely have their work cut out for them, because there is so much to do and so little time to accomplish what needs to be done now, and Dumaguete is in that crucial transition phase in its development where much of its heritage is in the brink of disappearing.
This is why I have decided to shift the focus of this column to local heritage matters, to give voice to what must be done in Dumaguete, and to ensure that our remembrance can become more concrete.
It’s the only way we can give honor to Prodi and to others like him who have toiled for years to give us what we now know—and take for granted—as the unique Dumaguete experience of being the “city of gentle people,” and the “cultural center of the south.”
Labels: art and culture, culture, dumaguete, heritage, history, negros
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Saturday, November 04, 2017
I will always feel the pain and dark anger of the likes of Alex Forrest, Angelique Bouchard … and Rebecca Bunch. But dear God, this episode of
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend [S03E04] goes dark so deeply, so deliciously. The insanity makes sense.
And I wish that in life there’d be a Josh Groban accosting me in the dark to sing something like:
Life is a gradual series of revelations
That occur over a period of time
It’s not some carefully crafted story
It’s a mess and we’re all gonna die.
If you saw a movie that was like real life
You’d be like, ‘What the hell was that movie about?
It was really all over the place.’
Life doesn’t make narrative sense.
Dear God, this show.
Labels: life, love, music, pop culture, psychology, television
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Winona Ryder, in an interview with Diane Sawyer for
20/20 in 1999, revealed how it was to be complicit in hiding our deepest pain under a facade of fabulousness: “I used to drive around [Los Angeles] at night listening to music because I couldn’t sleep. [Once] I was driving around, and I was wishing so badly that I had someone to talk to, a friend, someone — and I didn’t. And I saw this magazine stand, and I saw the cover of
Rolling Stone Magazine, and it said something like, ‘Winona Ryder, The Luckiest Girl in the World.’ And it broke my heart, because there I was being in so much pain and feeling so confused, and feeling so lost in my life. And I wasn’t allowed to complain because I was ‘so lucky,’ you know, and I was ‘so blessed,’ and I made a lot of money, and my problems weren’t real problems… But the stuff I was going through was difficult… I love the first line of [
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, a book about a girl going through clinical depression, and being institutionalised for it]: ‘People ask, How did you get in there? What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can't answer the real question. All I can tell them is, It's easy.’ Which I think is very true.” She produced the film adaptation of the book, she said, to give a voice to people exactly like her.
And yes, to be "interrupted" is "easy."
By 2001, Winona succumbed to the pressure and famously self-sabotaged -- a shoplifting incident that made headline news and ruined her career, but which she, in retrospect today, calls her saving grace.
I'm glad she's back.
Labels: books, celebrity, film, psychology
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I remember about six years ago I was looking at my own Facebook timeline, and an odd thought came to me: "I wish I had that life for real." It came unbidden, and I had to laugh -- but it revealed something about social media I think everyone knows at a fundamental level but cannot seem to grasp fully. All our posts are curated: we cherrypick our lives to create a narrative we want the world to believe about ourselves. IT IS NOT BAD, but it's also not good if we come to compare our days with the curated posts of our online friends. They aren't always at the beach. They aren't always chasing beautiful sunsets. They aren't always having dinners with fabulous friends. They aren't always gazing romantically at their beloved's eyes. You don't see the long and frustrating commute alone, or the rainy days, or the betrayals of an old friend, or the vicious fight with the significant other. [The ones who air their dirty laundry online is another story.]
Realizing this does bring a measure of relief, no? But it's a realization that's hard to sustain. We have been culturally programmed to think of photos as being truthful, and immediate. And so even though we know they are curated, seeing the visual representations of friends' social media selves make the old pangs of rabid comparison rise up again. That adventurous trip through Argentina, those beautiful flexed biceps from gym workouts, that fun Broadway show -- why am I here browsing Facebook in my pajamas in a bedroom that needs cleaning now?
Why am I writing this, at midnight? I'm really not sure, hahaha.Labels: life, psychology, social media
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