Sunday, January 05, 2025
8:33 PM |
I'm Taking to Bed. I'm Sick.
Labels: health, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, December 20, 2024
3:38 PM |
St. Luigi Patron Saint of Health Care as Human Right
Labels: health, human rights, humor, murder, people
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Friday, December 06, 2024
11:49 AM |
Last Class of the Semester
Still recuperating, but I got up to attend my last full class of the semester. Slowly and surely ticking off my last classes before the semestral break. Critical Writing Workshop, done! Fiction Workshop, done! Playwriting Workshop, done! Asian Literature, done! And finally done with Literature and Cultural Studies [which I'm just subbing for]. Now to rest.
Labels: health, life, silliman, teaching
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Wednesday, June 05, 2024
I’m full of gratitude today. It’s one of those days that make me realize there are people in the world who do care for me, and are there for me, and who wish me well. They know who they are, all the people I’ve interacted with today. Thank you.
Also, I finally finished writing this story! Finished it while waiting for my turn at my dentist’s clinic! [Note: I began writing this in 2009, and it has taken me fifteen years to finish it.]
Also, after months of quietly suffering, I fixed my dental issues and can finally eat properly! [But it was actually my dentist who texted me I needed to go to his clinic ASAP yesterday, without appointment. And then
gihatod ko pauli. Full dental care!] Thanks, Xandro Dael!
Labels: friends, health, life, writing
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Tuesday, January 10, 2023
My family has been grappling with a medical crisis over the holiday season, and it has been challenge over the past few weeks to deal with. It's our first of this kind of challenge since my father died 27 years ago. I've gone through the various stages of grief already, denial in particular, and then back again. I honestly don't know what to do, so I just try to remember to breathe.
Labels: health, life
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Saturday, June 04, 2022
I’m on the fourth day of my fast. This should have been my sixth, but I broke it because I was so stressed in the second day of my initial run. Afterwards though I told myself: “You’ll only get where you want to go if you have resolve, which means knowing the challenges and the pitfalls but forging ahead anyway.” Doing this for health reasons.Labels: fast, food, health, life
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Sunday, February 06, 2022
5:41 PM |
Dearest Concerned People Who Tell Me To My Face That I Need to Lose Weight in the Middle of a Pandemic
I was out in the world for once. It was an increasingly rare thing, to be out this way in a world still teeming with so much uncertainty.
Like many people I knew, I still harbored a suspicious regard for the outdoors, even in the beginning of the third year of this pandemic. A few weeks ago, someone I know had announced in his Instagram that—even after two vaccinations and a booster shot, even after all these time wearing masks and being extra careful—he had contracted the Omicron strain of COVID-19, and was battling a debilitating bout of it. “But I was going out a lot during the holiday season,” he wrote. “I shouldn’t have, but I did.”
I knew several other people who tested positive for COVID-19 in January. And that was enough to keep me indoors for longer stretches, again.
Not that I was already going out even before that. Taking care of my mental health was becoming a full time endeavor, and home and being out of the radar from people was proving to be comfort I needed to have. Or else go mad. Being out meant courting needless anxiety, so I stayed in.
And when I did go out, it was to combat the occasional stir craziness—and much as possible, only in the most furtive way. Like a mouse. And only in the company of people in my immediate bubble. And only to familiar places I felt was safe enough to be in—like the open-air comfort of Caña at The Bricks Hotel, which had become a second home in the pandemic.
And so when I do go out, the effort often feels like a prize, almost.
So I was out in the world at the Valencia municipal plaza for their Sunday tabo, which has also become a gathering place for many of the province’s major restaurants to set up stands to cater to the eating pleasure of the early morning crowd [a lot of them from Dumaguete]. It was my first time to be there, and it was a tentative joy to behold—given that I was also seeing people I have not seen in almost three years.
Near the end of our excursion, I saw a familiar face, someone I had not seen in many, many moons. There was a rush to my steps as I turned to greet her, my smile wide beneath my facemask, my fist ready for a bump in what had become the fashionable replacement for the old
beso-beso. Before I could even say a delighted hello, she said:
“Tambok na ka kaayo! You really should lose weight.”
I really should just had taken it in stride.
I knew where it came from. It is cultural. One can even argue that it’s an unfortunate part of our DNA as a people. Even before the pandemic shattered our lives and reordered the way we did things and dealt with each other, Filipinos were wont to say, “You’ve gone fat!” in lieu of hello—and you can, with all honesty, say it is our hello. Apparently even pandemics are not earthshattering enough to change this.
It is rude—but it is also deeply ingrained, most people don’t even realize they traffic in its crudeness.
Still, it’s not easy to take this in stride. Whether in Tagalog [“Tumaba ka!”] or in Binisaya [“Nanambok ka!”], the comment—especially when it comes as a greeting—astonishes because it always seems to come out of nowhere. Your mindset is to be warm in greeting someone you have not seen in so long, and when the response you get is body-shaming couched in tones of concern mixed in with the salutation, your mind reels. You feel attacked just when you are about to welcome the person in your bubble of familiarity. You are never prepared to give an appropriate response.
What is an appropriate response?
Here’s one: “Ikaw rin!” My closest friends tell me this when I ask them over the occasional chat in Messenger.
But it strikes me as a witless, even commonplace, response; never mind that it is also answering passive aggression with equal hostility—and my mother once told me, in what she said was helpful Biblical metaphor, that it is better to throw back bread when people throw stones at you. [The Bible, I later found out, never said anything remotely resembling this maxim. But I was an obedient Sunday School-bred kid. So I learned to throw bread metaphorically, but also to eat them literally when I needed to soothe whatever pain I felt. I was constantly on the verge of becoming a doormat with eating problems.]
Besides, I am always afflicted by what the French term
l’esprit de l'escalier, literally “the spirit of the staircase,” or what they call coming up with the perfect response a little too late. So when someone hails me with “Nanambok ka!” I almost immediately respond with nervous laughter—and think of the wittiest rejoinder thirty minutes later, the offending person already out of sight.
I am certainly not alone in this commiseration. In a 2019 paper on the context of fat-shaming among adult Filipinos, Dr. Roberto Prudencio D. Abello of De La Salle University-Manila’s Behavioral Sciences Department writes that “the contemporary Filipino setting is both harsh and humorous toward individuals labeled as ‘fat’ and in local parlance, ‘tabachoy’ that would suggest that fat shaming culture exists in the Philippine society.” He cites depictions [and reception] of obesity in our popular culture—including movies and television [think of Bondying and Dabyana and Vice Ganda’s infamous 2013 fat-and-rape joke involving TV journalist Jessica Soho]—as the battleground figures that codify the popular attitude towards weight. The ramification, he concludes, is a social hazard: many fat-shamed individuals in his study grapple with unending levels of shame that also leads to feelings of invisibility and inadequacy, among other things.
In other words, “Nanambok ka!” is not helpful at all to anyone’s mental health—so whatever friendly concern it may have been intended in its utterance is all for naught.
And besides, we are living in a pandemic!
When COVID-19 started its onslaught in 2020 and we were all forced to stay indoors for months, I knew what it entailed: it was a wholesale disruption to our ways of doing things, including our rites of fitness we once took for granted. Gyms closed down. We had no idea if it was even safe to venture outdoors for a run. And lockdown also meant, for most people, sedentary living bingeing on movies and TV and partaking of food that was closest comfort in precariously uncertain times. On Facebook, I posted: “In the next few months, please, let’s not comment on each other’s weight.”
There were many individuals, of course, who took to the pandemic like the perfect excuse to gain a six-pack. Good for them. Many of them had access to homebound gym equipment—which is privilege. Diet is also privilege. In Dumaguete, so many food delivery businesses sprouted in 2020, a lot of them touting the latest fad in “healthy eating”—but for a price.
I thought the pandemic was enough to give pause to the usual judgments on weight and other ornery things. I was banking on common understanding and goodwill. I thought: we were fighting a battle in this pandemic, surely we could afford to be kind to each other.
But still—after not seeing each other in months and months, there was this: “Nanambok lagi ka!”
In August 2020, actress KC Concepcion shared on Instagram her own experience with body-shaming: “I used to get body-shamed when I went on my 3-year hiatus for not having that Asian, stick-thin body (for an Asian like me), and many women like me get affected by this mentally, emotionally and physically. Going through a pandemic and realizing the big picture issues of the world, I realized life is to be celebrated, and enjoyed... Like, why would I choose to develop an eating disorder over losing all the extra weight healthily?”
Later, in November of the same year, the Department of Education had to issue an apology when a module for distance learning from DepEd-Occidental Mindoro took potshots at a celebrity and subsequently made the rounds on social media. The material, for a MAPEH class, prompted students with the following situation: “Angel Locsin is an obese person. She, together with Coco Martin eats fatty and sweet food in Mang Inasal fast food restaurant most of the time. In her house, she always watching television (sic) and does not have any physical activities.” It went on to ask students what would happen to the popular actress if she “continue[d] her lifestyle.”
Needless to say, I am perfectly aware that I have grown bigger as the pandemic stretches on. But I’ve weighed things—no pun intended—and have chosen to first take care of my pandemic-induced mental health issues. My anxieties add fuel to my being adrift, and I do find myself eating my feelings. [And food is such a glorious escape.] I will certainly get around to keeping fit. It is part of my recovery. I just do not need the casual reminders from the most random people that all they see of me—a person of so much more complexity—is my weight.
Most people I know never do this, I’ve noticed. It is only certain people, and I feel they are guilty of projection: the unsolicited remarks on people’s weight feel like shields to their own insecurities, deflecting their own deficiencies by lobbying petty grenades first. When I think of that, I ultimately forgive them. [But I do not forget.]
A good friend’s boyfriend told me, “You’re fat!” We were in Adamo and I had not seen them in six months, and this was how he greeted me. I forced a smile.
Was my hello not effusive enough? But I thought: He has bigger problems than concerns for my weight. In the middle of the pandemic, he opened a milk tea café near downtown, which promptly closed within six months. I must understand. So I just nodded and said, “I know.”
An older woman from a social circle I used to run in told me, “You’re fat!” We were grocery shopping in Lee Plaza and I had not seen her in a year, and this was how she greeted me. I forced a smile.
Was my eagerness to see her not sincere enough? But I thought: She has bigger problems than concerns for my weight. She found out her daughter’s a lesbian and had called for a hasty intervention that doubled as a threat—because it was apparently an embarrassment to their tony family. I must understand. So I just nodded and said, “I do need to go to the gym.”
An acquaintance from school told me, “You’re fat!” We were at the Pantawan of Dumaguete to see the Christmas lights and I had not seen her in two years, and this was how she greeted me. I forced a smile.
Was my fist bump not cordial enough? But I thought: She has bigger problems than concerns for my weight. Her husband is having an affair with their driver, and she knows all about it—but can’t do anything because her husband is also an abusive prick. I must understand. So I just nodded and said, “I’m going on a diet.”
(I have of course changed details in these blind items so as to spare these people embarrassment—a courtesy they did not extend me. I know they are probably reading this. But they do have bigger problems than my weight.)
Extend understanding, be a bundle of love, and know with all of your heart the difficult circumstances of our lives in these fraught times.
We’re alive! So far! That’s what matters most, I think.
When you meet someone you have not seen in months because of the pandemic, say: “I’ve missed you. And despite everything that is wrong in the world, you look fabulous.”
Labels: coronavirus, fitness, friends, health, life, mental health, social norms
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Sunday, September 20, 2020
9:00 AM |
The 1918 Pandemic and the Silence of Local History
All reckoning begins small, no matter how wide the sweep of things ultimately can be in the consideration of the bigger picture: we understand better when we begin with the specificity of the local.
The story of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 is a wide-ranging beast of so many facets—the horror of watching entire regions of the world—South Korea, Iran, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, Brazil—become epicenters of devastation one by one, the epidemiological detective hunt for the infected, the medical response formulated from a protocol of not knowing what works, the race for the vaccine, the preponderance of fake news [that harmful documentary Plandemic, which you probably shared on Facebook] and the elevation of quackery [“tu-ob,” anyone?], the political fallouts and triumphs connected to national action to contain the spread, the new sartorial debates over facemasks and face shields, the economic devastation told in impersonal graphs and statistics, the smaller but more vital economic story of human lives upended in terms of jobs lost and small businesses suddenly caught in the cross-hair, the new business normal of Zoom meetings, the maze and bureaucracy of travel restrictions, the mental health struggle of confinement, the drag of online class, the quarantine entertainment that saved us, the elephant in the room that’s China, the deaths of loved ones reported or unreported.
It’s a vast wealth of information we have about this pandemic. This is very much a product of an interconnected world thriving in an age where sophisticated information infrastructures [the Internet, mobile phones, etc.] have defined the way we live—often for the good, and also often for the bad. [Because just as good information can readily be accessed today with a speed of spread that’s astonishing, crippling fake news and missives of disempowerment even have notoriously faster spread, an infection perhaps more than dangerous than a deadly virus.]
We know so much [and also paradoxically so little], and we have a grand view of the pandemic devastating an entire year, an entire world. But as I said, all vital reckoning begins small, with the specificity of the local.
For me, it cannot be helped that I shall always associate the start of the tumult in the local. Sure, in January, we were already receiving dire news of a mysterious disease devastating a Chinese city we’ve never heard of before—Wuhan. But we went on with our lives with blinders on, thinking it could not possibly reach of us, and that if it did government would know enough to order specific lockdowns to stem contagion. [Alas.]
And then one day, we hear this news: two Chinese nationals from Wuhan, one of whom died, were the first two reported COVID-19 cases in the country. They landed in Cebu, then went straight to Negros Oriental from January 22 to 25, but were diagnosed of the disease at a hospital in Manila. What seemed remote and foreign suddenly had the veracity of the local. Suddenly, Dumaguete [and Cebu] was national news: COVID-19 had made its touchdown in the country. The local grapevine burst with whispers about the resort in Dauin the Chinese tourists went to, or the local Dumaguete hotel they stayed in. Suddenly we abandoned going to Chinese restaurants. Suddenly we were wearing masks. The headlines in local newspapers and the voices of local radio were mum about the details—but the whispers were more forthcoming. I remember going past that hotel one night in the interest of morbid curiosity; we found its façade curiously dark, its lobby empty, and we shook our heads, thinking that was the worst effect of the new disease on Dumaguete. We had no idea.
Suddenly Dumaguete was in lockdown mode, but one easily lifted after two weeks or so when quarantine of the locals who were around those two Chinese tourists proved no transmission took place. We heaved sighs of relief, and then things returned to normal—for a while. In hindsight, that was rehearsal, a prologue to the longest lockdown in the whole world. We had no idea.
Otis Historical Archives, National Museum of Health and Medicine
All these made me think about the local in the 1918-1919 Spanish Flu pandemic that devastated the world and killed millions—although its veracity and impact were only made more clear in the historical accounts that came later. How did Dumaguete and Negros Oriental, deep in the American Period as the rest of the country, fare in that devastation?
Turns out, there’s not much local historical research devoted to that pandemic—which I found sad, and should be a rallying call for local historians to fill a gap. In Volume II of Caridad Aldecoa Rodriguez’s seminal
Negros Oriental—From American Rule to the Present: A History, the section on the Spanish flu pandemic, which was called locally as
trancaso, is really just a short note, recording the virus’ virulence on the basis of a report of the then Director of Education. According to that report, the first wave of the pandemic began in June, with a more deadly wave to come in October. Of 345 teachers in Negros Oriental, 124 became sick, and one died. Of 15,916 students, 8,611 became sick, and 88 died. Most of the deaths were due to complications of pneumonia and bronchitis. All in all, 88 schools in the province were closed. But these numbers—given that they focus only on the public education sector of Negros Oriental, don’t really give us the full story.
In Arthur L. Carson’s
Silliman University: 1901-1959, the Spanish Flu is never mentioned, although we do get an account of the development of the Mission Hospital around that time. It mentions the pioneering efforts of Dr. and Mrs. Langheim in spearheading missionary medical work in the province, but had to go on a furlough in 1916 due to the illness of Mrs. Langheim, and they were temporarily replaced by Dr. Warren J. Miller who came just in time to put the mission hospital into shape for the opening of school in June 1916. Dr. and Mrs. Robert W. Carter arrived in Dumaguete by Thanksgiving Day of 1917 to replace the Langheims for good—“and soon Dr. Carter was treating fifty patients daily, but a former ailment recurred and he was forced to go on health furlough in July of 1919. His death came on November 21…” The health crisis occurred during the beginning of the pandemic, and Carter died near its tail-end. Did he die of the Spanish flu? History does not say so.
But it was not as if Dumaguete and Negros Oriental did not see the worst of the 1918-1919 pandemic. In Francis A. Gealogo’s “The Philippines in the World of the Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919,” published in
Philippine Studies in 2009, we know the Philippines was not spared by the scourge despite the American colonial government’s official downplaying of the real health situation: “[T]he years that exhibited the highest [mortality] rates were all epidemic years. Prior to the 1918 pandemic, the years with the most noticeable mortality figures were the cholera epidemic years of the early 1900s and 1908-1909. But these rates would not come nowhere near the high death rate of 40.79 registered in the 1918 pandemic. Clearly the pandemic contributed to the crisis mortality experienced at the time.” Gealogo also noted: “One may also observe that the provinces exhibited the highest rates were not necessarily those that were most proximal to Manila. Visayan (e.g., Negros) or Northern Luzon Pangasinan) provinces exhibited tendencies mortality rates for influenza during the year.”
In Gealogo‘s summary of total deaths caused by influenza in selected provinces in 1916-1919, we note the following numbers of the influenza dead: Bohol [1916:
40 dead, 1917:
11 dead, 1918:
382 dead, and 1919:
609 dead], Cebu [1916:
549 dead, 1917:
293 dead, 1918:
1,560 dead, and 1919:
716 dead], Iloilo [1916:
none, 1917:
none, 1918:
4,724 dead, and 1919:
275 dead], Negros Occidental [1916:
85 dead, 1917:
129 dead, 1918:
3,940 dead, and 1919:
215 dead], and finally Negros Oriental [1916:
none, 1917:
none, 1918:
1,737 dead, and 1919:
299 dead]. We may have fared better compared to our Visayan neighbors—and that may be because we had no working port open for outside commerce then [the pier was only constructed in 1919]—but 1,737 dead of influenza in 1918 is already a remarkable number.
I wish we could hear the voices of 1918 locals making sense of the virulence of the
trancaso. We need to unearth those voices—in old letters, in old diaries, if they have survived the decades of neglect, typhoons, and termites.
In 2020, we are at least privileged with all these available avenues and platforms for expressing how we are surviving another pandemic. It is in perfect contrast to the silence we’re getting from 1918—and we hope that our chronicles today,
which exist!, can provide a helpful voice for future generations to learn about how we’re faring in this test of human existence, from the world in general to the specific local.
Labels: coronavirus, current events, dumaguete, health, history, life, negros, philippine history
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Sunday, August 02, 2020
10:00 AM |
The Film Meme No. 99
[99th of 100]. If you told me before there exists a compelling drama that combines beautifully, and with such surprising humor, the following disparate things -- cancer, the holy sonnets of John Donne, proper bedside manners, the precision of words and punctuation, the exquisite use of Arvo Pärt's "Spiegel im Spiegel," and the rigors of teaching and research -- I would insist on the impossibility of the project. How can those things cohere into an acceptable story? But it does exist, in Margaret Edson's 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, which Mike Nichols adapted into a beautiful film for HBO in 2001. It's indeed made for cable television, but it has the weight of the cinematic and the craft of exemplary filmmaking, it deserves to be on this list. [Roger Ebert did the same, putting it in his list of top 10 films of its year, defying the technical consideration that this is a TV movie.] I'm not sure how exactly I came across it -- perhaps I was reading Ebert's ecstatic review for it, and was intrigued? It must have been such a huge curiosity in my part because I actually ordered the DVD of it on Amazon, waiting out the months it crossed the Pacific, to my enjoyment of it finally at home. But here is the thing: I'm a paranoid hypochondriac who believes every year I get to live to be my last year -- such is my mad tango with mortality -- and I generally avoid medical movies like this. I do not like the anticipation of seeing dramas where scenes of pain and suffering are part of the unfolding story, although when I do I occasionally learn to love and admire the best of them -- like
Terms of Endearment or
Parting Glances or
Lorenzo's Oil or
The Normal Heart or
Safe or
The Fault in Our Stars or
Cries & Whispers or
One True Thing. Mostly, I stay away. So what made me love this extremely dark film that does not shy away from showing the ravages of a cancer-stricken body? I think it is really the film's fierce intelligence, and its superb handling of its medical story by intertwining it with the poetic. Our protagonist, played by Emma Thompson with such assuredness, is Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., a renowned professor of English metaphysical poetry, who comes to a reckoning with her life when she is diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer. The film nimbly dips in and out of her past and her present -- as she goes through the comedy of diagnosis and initial hospital visits, and then the indignities of going through aggressive chemotherapy sessions at the hospital, and then her dramatized recollections of her younger self as a child to a linguist father, and as a student to a demanding mentor. All these slip into each other like gentle foldings and unfolding, sometimes intruding into each other, which makes her reassessment of her life -- with the occasional breakage of the fourth wall to address us fittingly -- more like a kaleidoscope of memory, recrimination, and hindsight. And the film's splendid use of poetry is nothing short of miraculous. Earlier on, we get the story's conceit when we get a flashback of Vivian as a college student, visiting her professor to consult on a paper she has written on Donne's "Death, be not proud," and we are treated to Eileen Atkins' Dr. Evelyn Ashford's explication of the poem's weight, with consideration of proper punctuations. Her monologue in full goes:
Begin with the text, Miss Bearing, not with a feeling. 'Death be not proud / Though some have called thee / mighty and dreadful, for / Thou art not so.' You've missed the point of the poem because you've used an edition of the text that is inauthentically punctuated ... You take this too lightly. This is metaphysical poetry, not the modern novel. The standards of scholarship and critical reading, which one would apply to any other text, are simply insufficient. The effort must be total for the results to be meaningful. Do you think that the punctuation of the last line of this sonnet is merely an insignificant detail? The sonnet begins with a valiant struggle with death, calling on all the forces of intellect and drama to vanquish the enemy. But it is ultimately about overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death and eternal life. In the edition you chose, this profoundly simple meaning is sacrificed to hysterical punctuation. 'And Death' capital D... 'shall be no more;' semi-colon. 'Death,' capital D, comma... 'thou shalt die!', exclamation mark. If you go in for this sort of thing I suggest you take up Shakespeare. Gardner's edition of the Holy Sonnets returns to the Westmoreland manuscript source of 1610. Not for sentimental reasons, I assure you, but because Helen Gardner is a scholar. It reads: 'And death shall be no more,' comma... 'Death thou shalt die.' Nothing but a breath, a comma, separates life from life everlasting. Very simple, really. With the original punctuation restored, death is no longer something to act out on a stage with exclamation marks. It is a comma. A pause. In this way, the uncompromising way, one learns something from the poem, wouldn't you say? Life, death, soul, God, past, present. Not insuperable barriers. Not semicolons. Just a comma. Life, death, I see. It's a metaphysical conceit, it's wit.
Beautiful tying up of all of the film's themes all done in the singular act of academic teaching. As an English teacher, I responded to this with so much heart. But beyond the poetry and its wrangling with mortality, I also appreciated how the film dared allow itself to plumb into the private fears and regrets of someone lying in a hospital bed alone. It does not shy away from the scary, but it remains empathetic, and in the end I find the entire thing deeply courageous. What's the film?
For the introduction to this meme, read
here.
Labels: film, health, medicine
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Thursday, July 16, 2020
9:10 PM |
Small Accomplishments
Done with my annual flu vaccination. Because it really does help, especially in easing the paranoia of hypochondriac me.
Finally finished Clinton Palanca’s The Gullet today over budbud, manga, and tsokolate.Labels: books, health, life
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Friday, December 05, 2014
7:18 PM |
The Slow Decay of Brilliant People
In a pair of 2014 films I've recently watched featuring what most "pundits" are predicting to be front-runners for the lead acting trophies in the current Oscar race, I found a connection in disease: Julianne Moore and Alzheimer's in Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer's
Still Alice and Eddie Redmayne and ALS in James Marsh's
The Theory of Everything.
Then again, what's new? Oscar attention has been traditionally lavish on the depiction of beautiful and heroic suffering through disease, physical or mental. It is a useless exercise to enumerate the evidence, but -- quickly now -- there's Daniel Day-Lewis' painter with cerebral palsy in Jim Sheridan's
My Left Foot (1989), and there's Russell Crowe's mathematician with mental illness in Ron Howard's
A Beautiful Mind (2001), and there's Geoffrey Rush's pianist also with mental illness in Scott Hicks'
Shine (1996). Most recently, there's Matthew McConaughey's AIDS-addled drug activist in Jean-Marc Vallée's
Dallas Buyers Club (2013). All these men have won Best Actor in the generous company of other men whose award-winning depictions of characters suffer from other ailments. There's gold, apparently, in suffering -- although comedy is harder.
Amazingly enough, the trend is less likely to occur for Best Actress winners -- with mental breakdown/illness seemingly the common denominator in the list, as in
Blue Jasmine's Cate Blanchett,
Silver Linings Playbook's Jennifer Lawrence,
Black Swan's Natalie Portman,
Monster's Charlize Theron,
The Hours' Nicole Kidman,
Blue Sky's Jessica Lange,
Misery's Kathy Bates, and
The Three Faces of Eve's Joanne Woodward. Of the nominees, we remember the most the glowing demise of Debra Winger in both
Terms of Endearment and
Shadowlands, Meryl Streep in
One True Thing, and notoriously, Ali MacGraw in
Love Story. Only Emmanuelle Riva's dementia in
Amour and Ellen Burstyn's drug addiction in
Requiem for a Dream seemed truly horrific in the lot -- nothing beautiful at all in their suffering, which might have been too painful for Oscar voters to consider.
I liked
Still Alice and
The Theory of Everything, but of the two, the former seemed more humanly invested in tracking true frailty in the face of physical degeneration -- which is surprising, considering the fictionality of
Still Alice as opposed to the true-to-life chronicle of
Theory.
But Julianne Moore is absolutely devastating as a brilliant and pathbreaking linguistics professor who gets diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. She brings an uncanny subtlety to the role that makes us see more her character's quiet engagement with disease rather than a showy performance that becomes a mere checklist of dramatised symptoms. Her slow descent to forgetfulness becomes even more terrifying, and yet still remain incredibly human. That scene where she forgets where the bathroom is in their house, for example, has a sharp unsettling sense of familiarity to it, as if to underline the fact that this could happen to anyone,
to us. And the whole sequence where she gives a speech, and wields a yellow marker to battle the seemingly random and sudden erasures in her memory is fraught with so much tension, and so much warmth, that we vacillate between being moved by terror or by well-earned sentimentality. Ms. Moore, in this role, deserves the Oscar everybody believes she is due for.
Eddie Redmayne's depiction of the great Stephen Hawking, on the other hand, also seems equally brave. And by the looks of it, doing it seemed technically difficult -- hence the whole performance easily becomes an effort in actorly bravura. But there's a sense about the film that makes it too much like a color-by-number exercise in Oscar-baiting biography, and that safe and almost predictable earnestness somehow undermines the performances of both Mr. Redmayne and Felicity Jones who plays Mrs. Hawking. Marsh's film -- unlike his superb Oscar-winning documentary
Man on Wire (2008) -- just did not draw me in as much as I'd like to, although a lot of it is very much admired.
Labels: diseases, film, health, medicine, people
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Friday, February 22, 2008
9:08 PM |
Everybody is Sick
I started this week with a slight flu, or whatever. Sunday night, and there was that familiar dry scratchiness at the back of my throat that told me a bad case of colds or coughing was about to set in, and so I battled hard with the impending disaster with a regimen of Vitamin C, lots of water, Neozep, Tempra Forte, Pharmaton, and sleep. Everybody's sick, it seems. Even the
American Idol girls, most of whom were just plain awful last night. And
Barack Obama, too, but even when he blows into a Kleenex, he gets applause. (That's presidentiable quality, I tell you.)
M. has head colds, too, and is eating lots of oranges. (I force him to shower constantly, and take Vitamin C.) I don't know what's up. The heat? The rain?
Labels: health, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, September 28, 2007
"Omentum" was the word I learned—or at the very least relearned—today, from Oprah. Truth be told, when I heard the term mentioned on television this morning, the word immediately sounded familiar, a possible relic from my forgotten days as a hapless physical therapy student exploring the nether regions of human anatomy and physiology. Some random things from our past always seem to cling to a kind of lasting memory. From that time, I remember most the Circle of Willis (because of Bruce), and now omentum.
Then again, it also sounded like a synonym for kinesis—something fast, perhaps, but not so much: in other words, “momentum” without an “m.” But I’m making a joke, of course, and the omentum, if you must know, is really that strange web-like tissue that blankets the digestive tract, and is basically the home of all those fat cells that soon make their presence felt as a tummy gone haywire. I’m talking beer belly here. Love handles, if you will. The blubber. Your own natural rubber tube. The stigma of anybody’s dream of a fit existence. My life story, really.
In
Oprah, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who happens to be the talk show queen’s surgeon of choice (he has the medical brilliance and the telegenic air that make him wildly perfect for daytime’s sludge of domestic profundity), was showing off the difference between the omentum of a fit person—something resembling a large handkerchief which has gone through too many rinse cycles in the washing machine—and that of an abundantly bellied person, which was horrifyingly constituted of a mass tissue resembling a small yellow parachute crinkly with age, and blobbing like a threat. Dr. Oz says: “The omentum is the fat organ connected to your stomach that’s only purpose is to catch and store fat. When the fat is stored in your stomach, your body has easy access to it. The fat then creates an inflammatory process that irritates your arteries and puts you at risk for blocked arteries.” The show-and-tell in
Oprah garnered the requisite gasps of horror and fascination from the studio audience, and we were all quickly entertained and taught.
On my bed watching the show, I quickly felt around my own belly, and acknowledged the painful truth:
what do you do when you feel around yourself, and encounter not a six-pack, but a beer keg? Everybody’s answer usually hover around three choices: (1) we live with it as a kind of secret shame, fondling like a horrible pet, and hiding it in ingenious use of wardrobe, (2) we live with it with a complete sense of denial, or (3) we live to defeat it and sweat it for days (months even) in some God-forsaken gym, hoping very much to recapture that elusive past when we were young, and our stomachs were flat, and we had no idea that the one eternal battle we might have to contend with the rest of our lives was the Battle of the Bulge. Sometimes I tell myself, if I had known at 18 years what I knew now at my age, I would probably have stayed away from the temptation of cake and soda, like they were the plague. But, like the saying goes, “Youth is wasted on the young.” Our adult life is basically penance for all the lost opportunities and the encountered headaches of youth. Once upon a time, I began drinking too much Coke—and now I am reaping what I had sowed. My
Mark cheerfully reminds me with this, whenever he can: “A minute of heaven in your mouth is a lifetime of hell around your waist.” He is 24, wise beyond his years, and is twig-thin.
I envy him. I am 32 years old, like the agonizingly fluctuating average of my waistline. (Sometimes it is 34, and sometimes it is 31. Sometimes when I reach 30 inches without cheating with the tape measure, I go out to celebrate—and the next day, I’m back to being 34. My wardrobe is increasingly littered with shirts and pants I can never really be sure I could fit in, day in and day out. The arbiter of this is the possibility of no buttons popping out.)
It’s not shallow to contemplate all this. The belly can be our own profiler or biographer, and it acts as a barometer for the state of our health. How many articles have we read about the link of heart disease and diabetes with increasing girth? How many magazines have we pored over to tell ourselves firmly that the idea of beauty is punctuated by a washboard stomach? It is the locus of our personal demons, and is the visible battleground measuring how much we kowtow to temptation, and how much self-regard we possess to be able to get off our butts and finally do some physical exercise. To think the otherwise would be to wallow in self-deception: you know you want that lovely, elusive flatness.
Which is why I completely enjoyed Eve Ensler’s
The Good Body—her take-off from the wildly successful
The Vagina Monologues, this time giving voice to the cultural battles we wage over the rest of our anatomy.
The play, presented by the New Voice Company and Silliman University’s indefatigable Cultural Affairs Committee (headed by the brilliant Susan Vista-Suarez) last September 21 at the Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium, was the last offering for the first cultural season of the academic year—and proved that Dumaguete City remains the Philippines’ distinctive cultural center of the South, having the
cojones, really, to bring in a fearless dramatic work that is not a shadow of clichéd theater but rather something that has a powerful message embedded in its unconventional staging. After the success of the Manila Symphony Orchestra’s well-attended concerts (two galas and a matinee) earlier this month, the boast is not really empty. (The MSO enjoyed their Dumaguete stay so much that renowned conductor Helen Quach chose to come back to Dumaguete several days later to bask in the memory, as well as in the pleasure of our beaches.)
In
The Good Body, Eve (played to comic perfection by Monique Wilson) encounters several situations (and people, among them
Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown, actress Isabella Rossellini, a generously-bodied Afro-American woman named Bernice, two Indian women at the gym, and three Afghan women contemplating the eating of ice cream) that will shed some light on her preoccupation with her belly. The result is a dramatic work that is powerful, although uneven—starting with a comedic high that is so promising, it is almost sad to note the diffused and didactic finish. Then again, who can ever top the tone and power of
TVM? Our memories of that play and our expectations of Ensler’s oeuvre only serve as a major hindrance to our appreciation of a play that dares to tackle such varied subjects a dieting and Botox, fashion magazines and skinny women, and the way we torture ourselves to bring forth out of our own physical selves society’s idea of a ”good body.” We learn that the process can border on the murderous.
While the play slaps us into realization on how we deal with the subconscious politics of our bodies, it does not force us to take sides, only to be careful and to be aware.
So now I have a choice: I look at myself and ask—do I accept who I am and just let go, or should I wage a bigger battle for the body I long for myself, mindful that this so-called longing may often be a result of a societal conditioning? The choices are hard, and dwell in the grays. For now, I choose only to pat my errant body part, and sigh….
Labels: health, life, theater
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
When I was in college, I was rake-thin, and had a waistline of 23 inches. I was always thin my whole life before that. I was
too thin in fact that when the wind blew, I'd actually get blown away. I decided to eat a lot of bread to gain what I thought was much-needed weight. Here was my daily regimen: every five o'clock after school, I'd go to the nearest bakery, in this case Gold Label Bakeshoppe, and buy three to six cheese de sal, which was then my favorite. I
devoured them. Several weeks later, I ballooned. People would stop me and say, "Hey, you look good." Honestly, I did look good: I was in that magical state when you are young, and is neither too big nor too small. (I was also a gym bunny by then. I was the original metrosexual in those days, and was known around campus as "the guy with the great butt.") When I went to Tokyo in 1997, I lost the weight I gained because:
(1) everything was too expensive, and
(2) that's what you get for eating mostly protein (chicken and sushi) the whole year. Didn't quite notice that though, because everybody else in Tokyo was as rake-thin as me, especially the boys. (And long-haired as well: in my case, however, I only got two haircuts that year, because it was just goddamn expensive.) You never see fat people in Japan. When I came back to Dumaguete, the first things people said were: "You need a haircut" and "You're too refugee-thin."
Ouch.I've eaten a lot since then.
Regrettably.I want to be thin again. Sex is absolutely better when you don't have a gut.
Ehehe. I'll be turning 32 this August. I want to lose 32 pounds by then. Here's wishing me luck.
Labels: health, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Thursday, December 14, 2006
1.I grew up reading Michael Crichton -- how I devoured his pageturners such as
The Andromeda Strain and
Congo and
Disclosure -- but starting with the disappointing
The Lost World, he seemed to have gone ... wimpy. And didactic. (Although you can make the argument: wasn't he always?) The last straw was his startling polemic about the non-existence of global warming
State of Fear. He has written a new novel called
Next. And now,
this?
Michael, Michael... what happened to you?2.So the rumor, which I found initially funny, is really true.
Being circumcised is a great thing.
3.My online time is consumed by monitoring
the awards fever.
Yes, I'm an Oscar junkie.
Labels: books, film, health, issues
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Monday, November 14, 2005
6:44 PM |
Cross Your Fingers, World
If this is true, then this is the biggest good news to come in a very long time. Should we celebrate in the streets?
Not yet, not yet... But God, I hope we can.
Soon.[via
criosdan]
Labels: health
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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