Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
It is inevitable in this day and age not to have an "online-only" friend -- people you consider very good friends, with whom you interact constantly online, but have never really met.
For this documentarian, meeting that kind of friend proved to be a disaster, and he gives us insight about what went wrong. It doesn't have to be a disaster all the time though. Dean Francis Alfar and I, for example, became blogger friends years and years ago, until he finally came to Dumaguete to visit me. We've been very good friends since then. It can happen. Would you be willing to meet with an "online-only" friend?
I miss blogging. I miss the length of posts and the ability to imbed images within the body of the post. I miss the sense of ownership and uniqueness - how I would change my layout from time to time to reflect something I thought or felt. I miss the ease of search. I miss reading other blogs, especially the long reads, and learning consistently more about another person or their interests. Once in a while, on Facebook, I'll break the dictum on short status messages and post something long - because sometimes, length is needed, and we all need long reads once in a whlle.
missing the point
If everything is better stated briefly, then I am not long for this world. I inhale to exhale worlds in words.
missing the past
When my eldest daughter was five years old, she offered up the usual challenge.
"It's time to tell stories, Dad," she said. "You tell one and I'll tell one."
"Oh, no," I told her, shaking my head. "I don't have a happy one in mind."
"What kind do you have?"
"Well, it's kind of bittersweet."
She expelled a sigh then looked me in the eye. "I like those too - but they make me cry."
"They make me cry too, you know."
"Is it really, really sad?"
"Well, not really, really sad," I said.
"Ok, then you can tell your story - but mine will be really, really exciting. An adventure, okay?"
"Ok," I agreed. "But you go first."
And she launched into an adventurous romp featuring lost crayons attempting to find their way back home, helped by the objects that shared similar hues.
I applauded when she was done, then cleared my throat and made ready to begin my own story when she raised a hand to stop me.
"Why?" I asked her. "Don't you want to listen to mine?"
"I do, Dad," Sage said as she nuzzled her way into my arms. "But I want to be here right next to you because I know your story is sad."
And so I told the story and my little girl listened. When we got to the really, really sad part, she looked up to me with tears in her eyes, which provoked my own.
"Can't this story be a little bit happy?"
"Wait and see."
And I finished the story, with a little happiness, and held the girl I loved so much, and we shared that moment after a story is told when only perfect silence is acceptable.
"That made me cry, Dad, but I really really liked your story," she told me later. "Now let's tell Mommy and make her cry."
Dean Francis Alfar used to blog at Notes From the Peanut Gallery. He would have posted this there, but he cannot recall his password anymore. He spends his time running Kestrel, writing fiction like his novel Salamanca [out now in a new edition from Anvil], and dancing.
This blog has been in existence since 2002, and throughout most of its existence, it has always used Photobucket as repository for its images. Last June, Photobucket changed its policy and has forbidden third party hosting -- consequently breaking up millions of images in the Internet, particularly those in blogs and message boards, including mine. I’ve decided to shift to Imgur, but I really don’t have the time anymore to fix all the broken images in this blog going back almost 20 years. [Thanks for nothing, Photobucket.] I’ve decided they shall remain broken, to remind me nothing is permanent in the digital world, contrary to its initial promises to be the best kind of archive.
The landmarks of my youth are slowly disappearing, and it's a little jarring. In the early days of the Internet, blogs and ezines were the thing, and slowly I gravitated towards specific sites that catered to my interests. One was Rufus Griscom and Genevieve Field's Nerve, founded in 1997, which purported to be a purveyor of literary smut, and by God it delivered with its salacious array of high-brow sex stuff, including erotic fiction by established authors and nude art and photography by up-and-coming artists. The other was Jessa Crispin's Bookslut, founded in 2002, a blog that was a daily and ever-changing compendium of everything bookish and literary. The former has become a shell of its former self, and the latter is now being retired. "The only reason why Bookslut was interesting was because it didn’t make money, and when I realized the sacrifices I was going to have to make in order for it to make money, it wasn’t worth it," Crispin admits.
I have been meaning to do this -- to blog consistently -- but I harbor excuses which teem by the thousands every single day. Foremost of which is that I have been quite busy, and Facebook and Tumblr and Twitter and Pinterest seem to have become the default platforms for the reportage of everyday things. Every new social media network that comes inadvertently chip away one more specific function we used to do under the generous umbrella of "blogging." And so we come to blog intermittently, using it only as an archive of sorts for our longer pieces which would have been too extravagant for the ADHD nature of other social media. And yet, every time I visit this blog, some sort of nostalgia kicks in for those glory days when blogging was all, whether in Blogger or LiveJournal, and finding and visiting each other's blogs was what composed an online community. I remember we took care to personally encode the html links to every blogger we were following, and took care to make every daily post we make a virtual essay of such concentrated opinion. (We were quite loquacious!) I also remember the early flak: those early dissenters who complained that what we were doing -- blogging -- was not writing but mere hisses in the wild world of online noise. How strange those comments are now. Nevertheless. Here we go again. Let's restart.
Let me try this experiment, for a week at least. There shall be no heavy social media involvement from me. Will use Facebook only for posting links and for business correspondence. No Twitter except to reply to friends. No FourSquare check-ins. No Instagrams. But a lot of blogging -- because, lo and behold, blogging is actually writing. Let's do this from October 18, Thursday at 5:45 PM to October 25, Thursday at 5:45 PM. Let me see if I can live without my usual heavy Internet rotation. Because I have got to start living a life offline.
1:44 AM |
Bloggers By the Light of Dormitory Punditry
I was quite fascinated by Gabriela Herman's photo project Bloggers, which aimed to shed some light -- usually from the glow of laptops, at least literally speaking -- on the human face of much of the chatter that goes on online. She tells Wired's Pete Brook: "I wanted to bring their intimate worlds to the outside public. Ultimately though, Bloggers is more about rethinking the way we experience the world, looking at how we live and spend our time.” (You can read Brook's full "Raw File" article here.) And take a look at some of the more famous denizens of that intimate world of blogging...
I got so fascinated, I finally decided the series begged emulation. And so, here we go...
It was ... the final straw--the ultimate confirmation that [Manny] Villar, in his quest for the presidency, was prepared to do anything to get what he wanted. He would throw away billions, engage in a pernicious campaign that ran the risk of blackening his name (as it did), invoke his brother's death for sympathy votes and allow his frail mother to fight his fight for him on TV--he would go through all these because he so badly wanted to be in power. Why? What was it about the presidency that made him so willing to give up so much? The thought has a scary, creepy element to it.
One of my bestest friends, the ever lovely and extremely talented writer Rica Bolipata-Santos, now blogs. I've been telling her to blog like since forever, because her brand of confessional nonfictional seems suited for it. And finally she has!
"Detachment for me doesn’t mean indifference. It means being able to be passionate about something and yet at the same time, having the ability to peacefully accept whatever it is that happens in the end. It’s about having the humility to accept that there are so many variables in the equation, and not everything can be achieved just by working hard on it, or by thinking that you are entitled to it because you are this and that. Life is full of these complex things. Being able to detach one’s self from the fruits of our labor, our pseudo-urgent wants, even from those we feel so much for, is an act of humility."
7:09 PM |
This Blog Will Come Back to Full Force on Wednesday...
... because blogging doesn't have to be dead. Really. [And I do miss the regularity of long-form blog writing. Now, if only Dean and other blogging giants would follow suit...]
I finally imported all my old blogs -- the ones I haven't deleted anyway -- into this blog. As far as Blogger is concerned, I have been blogging since 2003 (although I have actually already blogged before that). And as far as Blogger is concerned again, I have published 2,329 posts. That's a lot of posts. That's almost ten years of this life already.
Going through the archives, it's amazing to see how much I've been through, it's a little scary.
Zarah Gagatiga of School Librarian in Action sent me a blog award known as the Butterfly Award. Now here are, in random order, 25 cool Filipino blogs I know and visit a lot. (The original number was ten, but I'm feeling generous today.)
Some personal criteria came into play, and like Zarah, I kinda chose blogs because of things such as posting activity vs. dormancy; content; relevance; impact made in the blogosphere; and design and navigation. And, for the sake of spreading the good word for not-so-well-known blogs, I have not included some favorite blogging giants such as Notes From the Peanut Gallery, Manila Gay Guy, Manuel L. Quezon III, and {caffeine_sparks}.
This is a meme award and the rules for passing it on are:
1. Put the logo on your blog. 2. Add a link to the person who awarded you. 3. Award up to ten other blogs. 4. Add links to those blogs on yours. 5. Leave a message for your awardees on their blogs.
But because I'm a meme killer, the bloggers noted here really don't have to do anything. But spread the blog love, if you want.
Trust me, this will put the Happy in your New Year. I rarely rave about any blog -- because there's so much trash out there, and porn and spam always get in the way -- but this is the first time since Postsecret and The Search for Love in Manhattan that a blog has made itself something of a must-read for me. I just stumbled into Fuck You, Penguin, and it is the most darling thing in the Internet next to that game where you throw shoes at George W. Bush.
The blog is about something simple: it's a blog about putting cute animals in their place. Here's a sample post about ... puffins:
There's nothing more obnoxious than a fake animal that tries to pass itself off as an authentic member of the animal world. Puffins are maybe the biggest offenders when it comes to this, even going so far as to pretend to take pictures with humans and hang out in places like Iceland where no normal person can confirm that they were really there. (Like Iceland is a real place, anyway. "Björk" is from there!) Take a look at this clearly computer generated motherfucker above. Of course, he tries to blend into the scenery by standing by a rock in some grass, but do you see it? The only shadow is from the rock. IF YOU'RE SO REAL, PUFFIN, WHERE'S YOUR FUCKING SHADOW. Busted, Puffin. Now go back to living inside a fucking 8-year-old girl's head.
Precious!
But this one really had me in stitches...
In the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY put that foot down, Kitten! What are you trying to prove? You know what, Kitten? FUCK YOU AND EVERYTHING YOU STAND FOR. It might be your world now, Kitten. But you can't stay on top forever.
Bwahahaha!
Now go and read, and split your sides from laughing.
Speaking of The Search for Love in Manhattan, Faustus has a post that says something about the addiction I am currently enduring: Facebook. Here it is...
I understand that, for the young, Facebook has virtually innumerable appealing qualities.
However, for people of a certain age, the best things about Facebook, as far as I can tell, are that you find out
1) all the people you wanted to sleep with in high school but couldn't dream of doing so because they were straight are now gay; and
2) All the people you were jealous of and wanted so badly to be that it made you bleed are now fat and real estate agents.
6:08 PM |
Online-Only Friends
