Thursday, June 09, 2005
[WARNING: FILM OVERLOAD]
I believe that sometimes, the measure of one's heart lies in its capacity to let go. At the best possible time, of course, before the very fact of keeping lets in the rot, and destroys the very thing we hold dear.
I can fit this emotional template to many things in the world. There's the mother bird, for example, which must literally push its little offsprings out from the comforts of the nest, into the void of the air, that they might learn how to fly.
There're our biological mothers who must also push us out from the cocoon of their wombs and into the harsh light of the real, breathing world. It is vicious letting go, if you come to think about it, but one springing from an instinct of love and biological drive -- else the baby dies. The first cry we make as newborn babies is that of anguish really, because deprived suddenly of the almost-selfish sustenance and creature comforts of what had kept us.
We let go, thus, in order to grow. Or else we rot.
My own life contains varied examples of this theme. (Yours, too, most probably.) There's the post-adolescent flight from my childhood home, for instance, to seek out the unfettered sense of living on my own. And other things. But I will recount in this writing something else, and not anything that will typically come up in your mind.
I am going to talk about my video collection.I probably have one of the most extensive video collections in all of Dumaguete --
nay, this side of the Philippines. Of the last count, I had around 500 video cassettes of various titles in one of the
aparadors in my pad in Tubod. (This is not counting the over a hundred titles in my current DVD collection.) An acknowledged cineaste, which is fancy French for a moviehead, I first started collecting movies when I was a junior in high school and had then been lured by the magic of the silver screen. I had read earlier an article by Edward Behr in
The International Herald Tribune Magazine where he wrote that "our favorite films are our unlived lives unfolding in a magic mirror," and that no other art form has quite the same power to shape our views of ourselves and the outside world. Films, thus, have the authority of our dreams.
They did. Films transported me to stories that went beyond the restrictions of my geographical horizons. They were passports to many worlds, and for once I had a grammar of understanding everything else in the universe. I had to collect them -- because collecting them meant collecting the world.
Since then -- and much more manically when I began teaching Film Appreciation in Silliman University's School of Communication in 1999 -- the collection grew and grew. It was an eclectic list for the most part, and notoriously snobbish of Hollywood trash, save for Hollywood "trash" that I loved. It began with Betamax.
(Betamax! Does anyone still remember Betamax?) Went through a very long VHS phase, skipped the Laserdisc, and approached the VCD with much caution, because the latter was a clumsy format that halved movies into two discs --
a sacrilege.
The Betamax tapes, one could say, laid down the thesis, or the criteria, around which I began and nurtured the collection. I had five titles in the beginning: Stanley Kubrick's
Lolita, Alfred Hitchcock's
Dial M for Murder and
To Catch a Thief, Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise's
West Side Story, and Mike Nichols's
Biloxi Blues. The take on each one: a thoughtful, controversial art film before the term "art film" was even coined; early demonstrations of auteur theory meeting the grand old days of Hollywood; Hollywood at one of its musical best; and film at its most contemplative, using humor for insight.
Some came into my possession as repositories of memories of old college friends and places traveled. I bought George Cukor's
Born Yesterday in a clearance sale off Mitaka Station in Japan. Danny Fernandez gave me Gene Saks's
Brighton Beach Memoirs, John Hughes's
The Breakfast Club, and Lawrence Kasdan's
The Big Chill, because they reminded him of childhood, high school, and college in California.
The collection soon grew to include the best of the Hollywood heavyweights, including Martin Scorsese's
After Hours, Raging Bull, and
Taxi Driver, Woody Allen's
Annie Hall, Bullets Over Broadway, and
Manhattan, Francis Ford Coppola's
Apocalypse Now, David Lynch's
Blue Velvet, James L. Brooks'
Broadcast News and
Terms of Endearment, Brian de Palma's
Carrie, The Untouchables, and
Dressed to Kill, Roman Polanski's
Chinatown, Steven Spielberg's
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, and
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, George Lucas'
Star Wars Trilogy, William Friedkin's
The Exorcist, James Ivory's
Maurice, Milos Forman's One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Mike Nichols's
Postcards From the Edge and
Working Girl, Peter Bogdanovich's
The Last Picture Show, Robert Altman's
The Player and
Short Cuts, Quentin Tarantino's
Pulp Fiction, Stanley Kubrick's
2001: A Space Odyssey, and James Cameron's
Titanic.
Yes, even
Titanic, that most saccharine of all Hollywood pictures. And yet even that distinction did not faze my collecting, and soon I had some of the best (and worst? -- but divinely worse!) of the Hollywood assembly line: Cameron Crowe's
Jerry Maguire, Tony Richardson's
The Hotel New Hampshire, Robert Benton's
Kramer vs. Kramer, Roger Kumble's
Cruel Intentions, John Landis'
Coming to America, Paul Verhoeven's
Basic Instinct, Tommy O'Haver's
Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss, Mel Brooks'
Blazing Saddles, Amy Heckerling's
Fast Times at Ridgemont High, John Hughes'
Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Herbert Ross'
Footloose, Andrew Bergman's
The Fugitive, Doug Liman's
Go, Robert Redford's
Ordinary People, Barbra Streisand's
The Prince of Tides, John Madden's
Shakespeare in Love, Rob Reiner's
This is Spinal Tap and
When Harry Met Sally..., Curtis Hanson's
Wonder Boys, George Dunning's
Yellow Submarine, Richard Lester's
A Hard Day's Night, and Andrew Fleming's
Threesome.
Among the independents, I had Hettie MacDonald's
Beautiful Thing, Kevin Smith's
Clerks, Neil Jordan's
The Crying Game, Stephen Frears'
Dangerous Liaisons, Richard Kelly's
Donnie Darko, Mina Shum's
Double Happiness, Karol Reisz's
The French Lieutenant's Woman, Terry Zwigoff's
Ghost World, Christopher Ashley's
Jeffrey, Wayne Wang's
The Joy Luck Club and
Smoke, Steven Soderbergh's
Kafka, Joe Mantello's
Love! Valour! Compassion!, David DeCoteau's
Leather Jacket Love Story, Tom DiCillo's
Living in Oblivion, Ang Lee's
The Ice Storm, Danny Boyle's
Shallow Grave, Baz Luhrmann's
Strictly Ballroom, Francois Girard's
Thirty-Three Short Films About Glenn Gould, Agnieszka Holland's
Total Eclipse, and Jim Fall's
Trick.
But I also had some of the very rare ones. Including assembled clips by the Lumiere brothers who pioneered the whole cinematic art form, as well as Georges Melies who, in
A Trip to the Moon, first used montage to create what would be the mother of all special effects. I had Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's
Un Chien Andalou and F. W. Murnau's
Nosferatu, probably the best vampire movie ever made.
Of the old masters, I had Orson Welles'
Citizen Kane, Robert Weine's
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Sergei Eisenstein's
The Battleship Potemkin, Charlie Chaplin's
The Gold Rush, Jean Renoir's
Grand Illusion, Alfred Hitchcock's
Marnie, Rear Window, Birds, Vertigo, and
Psycho, Nicholas Ray's
Rebel Without a Cause, and Billy Wilder's
Sunset Boulevard.
Then there are the controversial films, which would include Bernardo Bertolucci's
Last Tango in Paris, Larry Clark's
Kids (about sex among teenagers), Nagisa Oshima's
In the Realm of Passion and
In the Realm of the Senses (both about obsessive love and murder), Bruce LaBruce's
Hustler White (about male prostitution), Anonymous'
Pink Narcissus (one of the earliest underground erotica ever made), Antonia Bird's
Priest (about gay priests), David O. Russell's
Spanking the Monkey (about incest), and Roeland Kerboasch's
For A Lost Soldier (about pedophilia),
And then there were the foreign-language films, which opened my ways to the various ways of the rest world: Vittorio de Sica's
The Bicycle Thief, Marleen Gorris'
Antonia's Line, Shekhar Kapur's
Bandit Queen, Nikita Mikhalkov's
Burnt By the Sun, Pedro Almodovar's
Carne Tremolo and
The Flower of My Secret, Giusseppe Tornatore's
Cinema Paradiso, Ang Lee's
Eat Drink Man Woman and
The Wedding Banquet, Chen Kaige's
Farewell My Concubine, Yasujiro Ozu's
Floating Weeds, Tomas Gutierrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabio's
Fresa y Chocolate, Wong Kar-Wai's
Happy Together, Jacques Tati's
Jour de Fete, Jan Sverak's
Kolya, Patrice Chereaux's
La Reine Margot, Andre Techine's
Les roseaux sauvages, Alfonso Arau's
Like Water for Chocolate, Giusseppe Tornatore's
Malena, Danis Tanovic's
No Man's Land, Agnieszka Holland's
Olivier Olivier, Zhang Yimou's
Raise the Red Lantern, Akira Kurosawa's
Ran and
Rashomon, Albert Lamorisse's
The Red Balloon, Tran Anh Hung's
The Scent of Green Papaya, Francois Truffaut's
Shoot the Piano Player and
Small Change, Andrei Tartovsky's
Solaris, Jaco van Dormael's
Toto le Heros, and Alejandro Gonzales Innarritu's
Amores Perros.
Among the documentaries, I had the extremely hard-to-find Robert Flaherty's
Nanook of the North and Leni Riefenstahl's
Triumph of the Will, as well as Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's
The Celluloid Closet, Terry Zwigoff's
Crumb, Alek Keshishian's
Madonna: Truth or Dare, Jyll Johnstone's
Martha and Ethel, and Douglas Keeve's
Unzipped. I also had two volumes of the New York Center for Visual History's American Cinema series, one on
Romantic Comedy and Film Noir and the other on
The Studio System and Film in the Television Age.
And then there were the Filipino films one rarely gets to rent in Videocity: Kidlat Tahimik's
Mababangong Bangungot, Chito Rono's
Bata, Bata, Paano Ka Ginawa and
Itanong Mo sa Buwan, Lino Brocka's
Bayan Ko: Kapit sa Patalim, Maynila Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag, Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang, and
Ina, Kapatid, Anak, Ishmael Bernal's Broken
Marriage, Manila By Night: City After Dark, and
Relasyon, Mario O'Hara's
Bulaklak ng City Jail, Mike de Leon's
Kakabakaba Ka Ba?, Kisapmata, and
Sister Stella L., Marilou Diaz-Abaya's
Karnal and
Moral, Carlos Siguion-Reyna's
Ang Lalaki sa Buhay ni Selya, Jose Javier Reyes's
Live Show, Lupita Aquino-Kashiwahara's
Minsa'y Isang Gamu-Gamo, and Peque Gallaga's
Scorpio Nights, Unfaithful Wife, and
Virgin Forest. There were also Nick Deocampo's famous documentaries, including
Oliver, Isaak, Memories of Old Manila, and
The Sex Warrior and the Samurai.
A veritable treasure trove of film titles. And what I have listed is only half of them.
And so we have come to the end -- to complete my thesis, and to explain the presence of past tenses all over the list:
I have let go -- donated all of them to the Silliman University Library. Because my pad is too small to accommodate a burgeoning library of movies, and books. Because DVDs are so much easier to collect, in the name of portability and long-life. Because Betamax is a dinosaur. Because my VHS player is not working anymore. Because the videos are just being stored in one of my
aparadors, bearing too much of time and humidity --
and molds have started to grow. That last one was the clincher. Molds were slowly defacing Kurosawa and Ozu and Chaplin and Welles. I couldn't bear that. At least, in the Library, the archiving system can bring back their health -- and when I want to revisit them, I could just take out a library card...
When I was putting them in the box for their transport Thursday, and when they finally arrived at their destination, I felt my heart constrict and cry. This box, after all, contains the testament to my days as ardent moviewatcher. That's more than ten years in my life. To let go was to feel pain, like losing a child.
But I let go.
Labels: film
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Teng is doing some soul-searching regarding church-going. I can't say I blame her, because I'm in exactly the same boat. (And if anyone of you "religious" people say, "Ahh! Backslide..." I'll slap you hard till Kingdom come, you holier-than-thou farthole!) I stopped going to
Bread of Life because the student who traumatized me the most as a college teacher goes there. I told myself: Heck, she goes to that church more regularly than I do, and look at what she actually is: A BITCH WITH A HEART OF COAL. I'm probably better off in my bed, sleeping, Sunday morning, or Sunday afternoon.
Labels: religion
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
5:50 PM |
Crucify Them!
I remember an old joke which I first heard when I was a child, and which, for me, crystallized the carefully and subconsciously constructed social stigma about being different, sexually. Most of the details of this particular joke I have already forgotten, but I do remember the punchline verbatim. It went this way:
"Ang mga bayot, ilansang sa krus!" (All gays should be crucified!)
And I remember how people laughed so hard. I was a kid, and I laughed, too.
Today, I think back on all of that, and this is my realization:
How can intimations of murder be treated as a joke? And why did people laugh so wholeheartedly?Or: Have I just lost my sense of humor? Am I too politically correct?
But if the joke's on you, would you appreciate it as something merely humorous?
I remember only too well a Conrado de Quiros essay about the not-so-innocent nature of the jokes we say. He once took to task, in his wonderful essay "Brown Skin, White Masks," the actress Vina Morales for laughing at an Aeta joke, and labeled it racism:
Its very innocence is the crux of its guilt. It's the sort of thing that can easily be waved off by saying one is sorry, one didn't mean any harm by it. Which will probably be well meant. But that is how the indigenous people are trampled upon in the worst of all -- innocently. By remarks that people are compelled to ignore or accept or laugh at at risk of being called humorless, or fault-finder, or makulit.
In that light then,
no joke is ever free of sin.And in the light of the punchline I've mentioned, this seems to be a truism for our times: Perhaps only the strongest person can ever be gay, and thrive. Even strong ones die for no other reason, except that they are different -- and for so many people that very difference necessitates even murder itself.
I write this in the memory of Matthew Shepard, who did die.
Who was Matthew Shepard? "Matthew was not very large, at 5'2" and 110 pounds, but he had a big heart and was extremely brave," says Winnie Stachelberg, a human rights activist, of the memory of Shepard, whose life and death has been movingly chronicled in the play and HBO movie
The Laramie Project. "He had the courage to live honestly and openly in less than ideal circumstances. Unfortunately, like many gay men and lesbians, there is often a high price to pay for living a life of dignity and respect."
(Dignity and respect? Some people did not even think so. "MATT SHEPARD ROTS IN HELL." "AIDS KILLS FAGS DEAD." "GOD HATES FAGS." These were just few of the protest signs put up by one Rev. Fred Phelps and his supporters, as they picketed the Shepard murder trials.)
When they found Matthew Shepard's unconscious, beaten body on the morning of October 7, 1998,
they thought he was a scarecrow.He wasn't. He was a young man soon to die from fatal wounds, dying for being -- in a world of intolerance and moral fanaticism -- gay.
He wanted everybody to call him "Matt," a nice-enough nickname which conjures a personality that was aptly him: an affable college boy in Laramie, Wyoming on the brink of a life full of possibilities.
On October 6, the 21-year-old met Aaron James McKinney and Russel Arthur Henderson in a bar. After he confided to them that he was gay, they deceived him into leaving with them in their car. He was robbed, brutally beaten, tied to a fence, then left for dead for 18 straight hours -- tied to a wooden fence outside Laramie, 30 miles northwest of Cheyenne. McKinney and Henderson also found his address and proceeded to burglarize his home.
Shepard was discovered 18 hours later, alive and unconscious. He died in a hospital on October 12, 1998. The blood on Shepard's face had been partially washed away by tears, indicating that he had been conscious, for some time, after the beating. He had been pistol-whipped 18 times with a .357-caliber Magnum.
The wages of hate, indeed, is murder.
Today, outlined in a recent book published by the late Pope, gayness is even considered "evil." As a lapsed Protestant but full-time Christian and humanist, I considered it a point of pride that I once looked up to this man as a towering symbol of spirituality, muscular intellect, and integrity. He was a man usually unfazed by tiring traditions, ready to embrace necessary change to reflect the spirit of the times. He wasn't like that primitive Pope who once forced Galileo to recant his astronomical sacrilege. But was he?
What happened?
There are no words to explain why, and I will let my good friend, and extraordinary logophile, James Dalman to say the things I want to say, but can't:
Poor us. With the Vatican's hateful opinion of homosexuals everywhere, we have officially been lowered to the level of the banal, the perverse, and the debauched. To say that we are evil is to justify the Laramie killing and a host of others before it. To tag us as un-Christian is to animalize faith. If there was anyone in the world who should bestow sympathy on us, it should be the Pope himself. After all, he personifies God and embodies his soul. Is bigotry of God's? It's of the devil's.
For a while, it seemed like gay men and women have come a long way from the dark days when homosexuality was considered a psychological aberration, and necessitated electric shock therapy. (It took the American Psychological Association until 1974 to strike homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.) But the 1990s was a decade of slowly growing tolerance. Then George W. Bush, in a paranoid post-September 11 world, stepped in and led the way to a resurgence of institutionalized "moral" crusades.
In the Philippines, that institutionalized hatred against gay men and women takes the form of regular news stories showcasing the arrest of gay people caught in the middle of lewd acts in various spots of clandestine meetings: movie theaters, parks, city streets, bars, and bath houses. Stories such as these have taken such regularity in news programming, it isn't even news anymore.
What is so newsy about theater raids conducted by the moral police and a television crew? It's a regular rite of crucifixion and shame, seen almost every month with such vicious regularity. And for what? Ratings. According to a reliable source, "gay" news always gets top ratings for any news show.
Think about that. Media as capitalist vulture, donning the cape of morality not for the latter's sake, but to give prurient news bites in the name of journalism.
And yet, and yet... Gay men and women are everywhere. In
Sis, a popular morning show in GMA, the Raging Divas have a segment all their own. That's a daily dose of transvestitism unseen in the whole history Philippine television, save that quaint pioneer, the Super Sireyna segment of
Eat Bulaga. Even
Mel and Joey features drag queens regularly, and GMA greenlighted the first openly-gay TV show,
Out. It has now gone off the air, but that is to be expected of all pioneering efforts. (Think
Ellen, which eventually paved the way for
Will & Grace.) There's now
Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. There's
Queer as Folk. There's
Six Feet Under and
Oz. There's Brini Maxwell giving Martha Stewart a run for her money.
History and all of civilization has been shaped by gay men and women as well. For a long time, though, that wasn't the case. Gerald Unks once wrote:
Within the typical secondary school curriculum, homosexuals do not exist. They are 'nonpersons' in the finest Stalinist sense. They have fought no battles, held no offices, explored nowhere, written no literature, built nothing, invented nothing and solved no equations. The lesson to the heterosexual student is abundantly clear: homosexuals do nothing of consequence. To the homosexual student, the message has even greater power: no one who has ever felt as you do has done anything worth mentioning.
That has of course been proven wrong. What would the West be if Alexander the Great had not redrawn the political maps, and led to the grandeur that was Greece? Julius Caesar,
who loved both his oysters and his snails, so to speak, did the same thing and led eventually to the greatness of the Roman Empire. And where would literature be without William Shakespeare, or Oscar Wilde, or Walt Whitman, or Marcel Proust, or Nick Joaquin? Fashion without Calvin Klein and Tom Ford and Inno Sotto? Film without Ishmael Bernal and Lino Brocka and Jeffrey Jeturian? Music without Cole Porter and Elton John and Melissa Etheridge? Art without Andy Warhol? Economics without John M. Keynes? Heroes without Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt? Movie magic without Marlene Dietrich, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, and Rock Hudson? The Bible without King James? Philosophy without Aristotle?
They are all great men and women, and they are all gay.
Newsweek had a recent article about gay men influencing the very notion of relationship -- often heterosexual -- itself. The article posited that what we know today as the cultural arbiters of male-female dynamics largely spring from the minds of gay men.
James Poniewozik writes:
A curious thing is going on in the U.S. Even as the nation is writing gays out of the definition of its most exalted relationship, gay writers -- like Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry and Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy -- are behind the TV shows that are most provocatively defining straight relationships. HBO's Six Feet Under, the multilayered story of the lives and loves of a family that runs a funeral home, sprang from the mind of gay screenwriter Alan Ball (American Beauty). Before it, HBO's Sex and the City, which set the standard for frank talk about women and love, was created by Darren Star and later run by Michael Patrick King, both gay. (Later this year, King debuts The Comeback, an HBO sitcom starring Lisa Kudrow as an actress trying to revive her career.)
In fact, that notion goes into almost everything: Your sense of celebrity?
Gay Hollywood. Your ideal of femininity?
Gay men behind all of our beauty pageants and beauty queens. Your street language?
Extracts from old sward vocabulary. Dedma. Keber. The paradox becomes this: while much of the world expressly disdain homosexuality, they gloriously -- often without clue -- make themselves part of a culture largely shaped by gay men and women.
This point was made manifest to me one time when I went to a party, and The Village People's "Y.M.C.A." suddenly blared out of the speakers. The catchy and familiar dance tune drove everybody to the dance floor, and everybody was soon spelling out the acronym with various body parts. Everybody.
The girls. The guys. The machos from school. And I smiled to myself and said: Do they even know this used to be
the Gay Anthem of a bygone era? That the song is a story about a young man, an innocent country bumpkin, who comes to the big city, and finds love and intimacy in the showers and bedrooms of the YMCA hostel, which in the 1970s was a famous New York mecca for up-and-coming gay men?
Which makes the current homophobic air a paradox, really. A few months ago, I knew of the first instance of gay bashing in the darkened corners of Escano Street off El Camino Blanco in Dumaguete. And two still unsolved murder cases in Dumaguete involved gay men. One was that of a public school teacher. The other a well-known fashion-designer who was hogtied with his own phone wires, and then set afire.
We can ask why, but there are no forthcoming answers.
The psychology of homophobia is actually quite interesting. Why do some people hate gay people with such viciousness, and often without due cause or effort by their victims?
It's all about "mirrors," a friend once told me. Some people, confronted with a
kasarian so much like theirs but "perverted" in a queer fashion, "see" the sexual possibilities of their own "straight" selves. And they are so afraid of what they see, they will rather beat that representation out with hurtful words (like
"Bayot!" or
"Bakla!"), or murdering tools.
In other words, if you hate gays so much without any direct or clear reason, chances are you're gay yourself, and deathly afraid of it. So, if you think about it, if you are ostensibly "straight," and yet you find yourself rising to anger just seeing gay people, quickly look into your self. The anger might not really be about the people incurring your wrath. It could be your own sexual insecurity speaking. Most homophobes, strictly speaking, are closeted gay men and women. Consider the recent case of Jim West who, as a conservative Republican mayor of Spokane, Washington, was well-known for his rabid anti-gay views. It turns out, he was very gay himself -- only a hidden or closeted one. From people like him, their jeers and judgments become their shields, their deflectors.
(Somebody should tell the macho Tulfo brothers this.)So, tonight, I watch another news story detailing yet another raid in, of all channels, NBN. A significant part of me, of course, says that the police is right:
a movie theater should never be a place to procure sex. It is, for the lack of a better word,
malaswa. A private act is a private act, and justice -- especially when it comes to prosecuting those whose libido goes towards minors -- knows no sexual preference.
But I can't help but think it goes beyond that. The raid is a manifestation of a systematized stigma for gayness: the humiliation is complete, with handcuffed men being forcibly shone with lights and a microphone thrust to the office to get some kind of contrite confession.
Examine regular newspaper headlines concerning crimes, for example. When a straight man rapes a girl, the headline objectively reads: "Man rapes 12 year old girl." But when a gay man rapes, the gayness is always taken into account: "Bakla gumahasa ng tinedyer." Why is this? Think of the otherwise. Do we see headlines like, "Heterosexual man rapes girl"?
The message seems to be this: If you are gay, we are going to humiliate you on national television.
Going back to that joke I wrote about in the beginning of this essay... The last time a joke so much like this became very popular, it was then to equate Jews to useless rodents in pre-World War II Germany. The result: six million people slaughtered in the Nazi holocaust machine.
No joke is ever innocent. Eventually, things like these are no laughing matter.
Labels: gender, issues, queer
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Monday, June 06, 2005
4:30 PM |
Burgis Ko. Ikaw Pud?
This week, I can't wait to get my hands of my copy of Mariel N. Francisco and Fe Maria C. Arriola's prize-winning
The History of the Burgis, courtesy of dearest
Teng who bought it for me, and is sending it in a day or so. (I tried ordering the book online in
Libros Filipinos, but
ang hass-el talaga pare.)
Why am I so interested? Let's face it, I'm
burgis, you're
burgis, most people in my circle are
burgis, whether we like it or not. (
Kung ayaw mo ng Pilipino,
bourgeoisie na lang.) Might as well own up to it and see the roots of our class, our kind. (It's also research for my novel about the surfaces of class...)
Labels: books, history, philippine literature, society
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, June 03, 2005
8:56 PM |
Fahrenheit 451 Comes True
Fascists.Labels: books, issues
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Thursday, June 02, 2005
10:38 PM |
Terrible, Delicious Secrets
I stumbled on this in
Veronica Montes's blog, and she is right.
This is extremely addicting, in a voyeuristic kind of way.
Secrets -- especially anonymous ones, in postcard-size, and all done up in tinsel and color and cut-outs and what-not -- are fascinating because they strip all of us to our barest selves, down to our darkest sides that I think make us so much more human because they do not deny the animal within us. Animals that secretly loathe, that secretly pine for contraband dreams, that secretly hope beyond all the odds, that secretly hate and murder in our daytime fantasies, that secretly wish we are somewhere else and
not here.
I'm wishing there's a book on this soon. The
New York Times' Sarah Boxer
writes:
One odd thing about PostSecret is that there's a real disconnection between what the confessions are and what the readers think they are. One reader from Texas wrote, "Thank you so much for building a window into so many souls, even if it only shines light on the darkest part." A reader in Australia wrote: "Each is a silent prayer of hope, love, fear, joy, pain, sorrow, guilt, happiness, hatred, confidence, strength, weakness and a million other things that we all share as human beings... there is no fakeness here."
No fakeness? Oh, but there is. And it is the fakeness, the artifice and the performance that make this confessional worth peeking at. The secret sharers here aren't mindless flashers but practiced strippers. They don't want to get rid of their secrets. They love them. They arrange them. They tend them. They turn them into fetishes. And that's the secret of PostSecret. It isn't really a true confessional after all. It is a piece of collaborative art.
What's your deadliest secret? I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours.
Labels: life, strange things
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
8:17 PM |
From Cassidy the Lemur
So here's an interesting survey.
1. Reply with your name in the comment box and I will write something I like about you.
2. I will then tell what song/movie/icon reminds me of you.
3. If I were to apply an o'clock to you, it would be...
4. I will try to name a single word that best describes you.
5. I'll tell you the most memorable moment I've had with you.
6. I will tell you what animal you remind me of.
7. I'll then tell you something that I've always wondered about you.
8. Put this in your journal.
Ginny did me:
What she likes about me. You make people feel special. You appreciate beauty in all its forms, and you are open to the universe in every possible way.
(Aww, that's sweet!)What song/movie/icon I remind her of me. David Cassidy.
(This David Cassidy? Is there a resemblance?)
If she were to apply an o'clock to me, it would be... Midnight.
(Dark, man.)A single word that best describes me. Inspiring.
(Oh?)For her, the most memorable moment she has had with me was... In the prison cell in O.K. Pensione, on our last night, when you were trying to convince me to go out with the rest of the group. I was lying stomach down on the bed, flipping through your photos of us, while you kept brushing the hair out of my eyes.
(I did?)The animal I remind her of. A lemur.
(This animal? Are my eyes really that big?)
Something she has always wondered about me... If you had a chance to migrate the country permanently, would you?
(In a second. I never belonged here in the Philippines. Only Dumaguete feels remotely like home, and barely. I think I'll live in Seattle for the rest of my life. I love the rain in Seattle.)Now, let's try to do
you.
Labels: memes
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Abortion leads to a major drop in crime? Photos in online dating sites are a must? Spanking is good for your kids?
Interesting. Alas, National Bookstore in the Philippines -- everybody knows this -- is more commonly known as National Disaster. So, please, somebody,
buy me this book.
Here's the
website. Bill O'Reilly talks about it
here. And Nerve.com interrogates the authors
here.
Labels: books, issues
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, June 01, 2005
10:54 PM |
The End of Having No Face
Not knowing the most vital of things -- the face, the name -- can take on a certain romance, the kind we have for what escapes us. There is a tingle in the knowledge of deeply-held mystery, the bloodbound secret, and the anticipation of eventual unmasking. Just like the striptease, where the stripping is the main deal and the revelation of the naked body the hohum foregone conclusion, we take to the fascinating anonymous like a fever.
Like all sane mass communication graduates, I wanted to be Bob Woodward -- or at least the Robert Redford version of the famed journalist. Heck, I watched Alan J. Pakula's
All the President's Men a total of
six times. One of the attraction was the shadowy identity of the world's most famous whistle blower. But suddenly, just like that, we know finally
who Deep Throat is. And it is quite a letdown, this finally knowing.
He's an old guy. Far from the strapping Hal Holbrook in Pakula's movie. The journalist Hank Stuever
writes about it in -- where else? -- in
The Washington Post:
What's gone is the last best secret, wrested from the grip of the select few who'd vowed to keep it. The hiding of Deep Throat's identity took on a larger mythic status than any scoop Deep Throat provided, and much of Washington -- media, officialdom, even tourists who snapped the Watergate complex -- guarded the almost holy belief in Deep Throat. He was the perfect, nameless god. It was the idea that reporters (and their background sources) could save the world, and that trust was still trust, and truth was still true. People now go to parking garages to get their cars.
What could be more of a letdown than finding out who Deep Throat is? Finding it out in Vanity Fair? And not really finding it out in Vanity Fair so much as feeling it crash-land across the Internet and the cable news networks, days before the magazine even hits the stands? Finding out that you don't care anymore? Watching it not resonate among people younger than 30?
An era finally passes. But I admit I've always liked Andrew Fleming's film version of Deep Throat's identity better in the comedy
Dick.
And talking about revelations of identity, now we finally know who the incredibly hilarious, fabulously fascinating
The Search For Love in Manhattan is. Ladies and gentlemen, meet
Joel Derfner -- your modern Oscar Wilde, and everybody's witty guide to the emotional roller coaster we call New York.
And he has a new book of gay haikus.
Labels: issues, journalism
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Tuesday, May 31, 2005
Of course, I'm back. (Hi, Francois! Did you get my letter yet?) I'm in Howyang in this picture, trying to get dinner of spicy chicken wings.
Yum. Been trying to grow my hair lately...
What do you think?
Labels: life
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4:58 AM |
Redefining the Bamboo
The very nature of the bamboo -- which is among the most useful of all plants -- provides a fitting metaphor for understanding the mechanism of the success, and the continuing goals, of
Buglas Bamboo Institute (BBI) in Dumaguete City: the bamboo is resilient, it is highly functional in so many ways, and it is always conducive to growing to its fullest potentials.
There is, all over the world, over 1,500 species of bamboo. A significant portion of them grows in Asia, with the Philippines breeding many of the species best suited for the manufacture of specialty products. According to experts, their uses can astound in the way they vary: bamboos, of course, are highly decorative plants, but their compact and highly-complex root systems also make the bamboo environmentally useful because of its magnificent capability for controlling erosion. Houses, screens, and windbreakers have been made from bamboo, and its culms have been used for an array of things, from bridges to rafts, from fishing poles to garden stakes, from water pipes to scaffolding, from carving to jewelry, from cooking utensils to woven mats and baskets, from fences to furniture. Toys and musical instruments have been made from bamboo. The bamboo organ in Las Pinas, for example, was constructed in 1818 from 950 bamboo culms -- and is
still operational. There is no construction material as hard as bamboo. Its complex physical structure makes it a hardwood material perhaps comparable to steel -- but is, almost paradoxically, waterproof, light, bendable, and tough. In many Asian cuisines, edible bamboo shoots are also considered a delicacy.
The bamboo gets into the record books as the fastest growing plant in the world, and its continuous regeneration makes it an authentic "sustainable resource." What is remarkable about the plant is that, under certain beneficial conditions, new shoots become taller and thicker over the years, until that particular species of bamboo planting reaches its maximum potential in terms of height and breadth. While the mother plant produces new shoots every year that develop to their maximum height within a few months, the poles can be harvested after 4 or 5 years when they reach their maximum tensile strength. And bamboo can grow relatively anywhere. Thomas Walta, the DED specialist currently assigned to look over the manufacture and design component of the BBI, says that bamboos generally thrive on moist and rich soil, but are fairly tolerant of varying soil conditions. "That is why they grow mostly beside riverbeds," Mr. Walta says. But once they take root to any particular environment, they become reasonably resistant to drought -- hence their remarkable resiliency.
That may be the same exact story about how BBI itself came to be.
Resiliency. That story is also the chronicle of a socially-minded Carmelite missionary who came to the Philippines from the Netherlands in 1964, and quickly took root among Filipinos, particularly those who lived by the skin of their teeth and the caprices of often cruel fates.
Frans Kleine Koerkamp's first assignment as a man of the cloth was in Escalante, Negros, where his social education about the plight of common Filipinos first flowered. "I would take a walk in the barrios of Escalante," Mr. Koerkamp recalls, "and already I could see so much of extreme poverty among so many people." Moved, he decided to help form a credit cooperative in town -- but soon his social activism took its first mark in the eternal skirmish of local class wars: he eventually got himself in trouble with the local
hacenderos or landowners.
In 1972, he was transferred to Iligan City, but there his social activism became even more heightened. He helped setup labor organizations, with the sole purpose of starting a housing project for local workers. In those days, that brand of advocacy was already enough to cast suspicious eyes from the authorities, and when military rule became instituted under President Marcos, Mr. Koerkamp again got into trouble. In 1980, he was in Manila trying to organize church people to become more aware about the social evils of Martial Law, focusing mostly on human rights abuses, which he saw firsthand happening in the countryside.
By the end of that tumultuous decade, Mr. Koerkamp's social activism took on a different focus. "I had, by 1989, become aware that there was a need for a kind of socio-economic progress for political advocacy, but I didn't know what to do," he said. His wife suggested that perhaps he stayed, at least for a while, in a typical
barrio -- where he might grow into seeing what needed to be done.
In 1994, he settled in Dauin, a town south of Dumaguete City. In
barrio Casili, he noticed there were plenty of bamboo plantings -- an abundance that belied the stark social realities of the place. The land in Casili, just like most land in the province and elsewhere, have become privately owned and subdivided, with the local farmers left to tenant the land, producing mostly coconut and
maize. "The children of the
barrio farmers knew only to get out of the place as soon as possible, and go into the big city -- where they end up selling cigarettes or becoming housemaids," Mr. Koerkamp remembered. "That got me into thinking... If we could only do something with the plentiful bamboo, we could increase the income of the farmers -- and perhaps, in the process, empower them as well." He concluded that the utilization of bamboo, whatever that may be, should be in the hands of the people.
By the time Mr. Koerkamp came into that conclusion, countries around Asia already knew of the bamboo as a source of a multi-million dollar industry. In the Philippines, however, he knew he had to start from scrap. First, he had to convince local farmers about the value of the bamboo itself -- a feat in a country already used to concrete and the like. Between 1995 and 1999, he devoted his efforts to research, and was astonished to find out that in a given year, Negros Oriental
alone is capable of producing between 90,000 to a million poles -- but that
only 30,000 of these per year are being used.
Buglas Bamboo Institute -- which took into its identity, "Buglas," the pre-Spanish name of Negros Oriental -- finally came into being in the interim, with initial support from Dutch developmental organizations. In 1999,
Deutscher Entwicklungsdienst (DED) came into the picture, with the primary aim of extending technical expertise, and networking potentials, to the program. That year, DED's Andreas Eineg helped set up the extension component of BBI -- something which sets the Institute apart from typical business entities:
it is a corporation with a social conscience, and works actively to develop it. For the most part, this is an evolution of Mr. Koerkamp's belief that corporations should develop a benevolent social dimension to help the poor.
Set up as a support base for the marginalized farmers and rural poor of the province who have little stake in the formal economy of the country, BBI urges them to make their own living through their own enterprise, by producing something in their fields, in their homes, or in small workshops -- in other words, helping communities make sustainable use of local resources for their welfare. That resource, in this case, just happens to be the bamboo, which farmers -- in localities such as Maayong Tubig, Si-it, Lunga, and Apolong -- breed, harvest, and sell to corporations like the BBI, which in turn manufacture them into profit-making products. Today, BBI's biggest products range from raw bamboo materials, to elegant furniture, to the construction of houses and gazebos.
But it is also an institution currently in the crossroads of its existence -- and the question now is how it must become more viable in the future. For that, it is in the stages of splitting the closely-linked production and extension components to become more sustainable, but still aims to retain the overriding social orientation that started it all.
For the most part, the future looks bright. Local sales of its products have gone up almost 200%, especially with the Institute's success in the 2005 Cebu Exposition, where it won a Mugna Award for Best Outdoor Design for an intricately conceived lounge chair.
The international market is also being exploited, with orders now streaming in from everywhere, particularly from the Middle East. By 2006, according to new CEO and business head Samuel Ruiz, the BBI will finally get into the black, rising above the break-even point. Within three years, the company will finally be earning for good.
The challenge, it seems, is to firm up the business side of the program, meet customers' needs, streamline the factory in Dauin, and control overhead.
But perhaps the bigger challenge BBI is facing is in promoting the bamboo as "the grass of life," restoring the original significance of this indigenous resource. Although very much a part of Filipino culture, bamboo has lost much of its importance in the lives of the common people, and has become dubbed "the poor man's timber." The ultimate aim, Mr. Koerkamp admitted, may be for "the culture to be redeveloped since it has already been damaged for 500 years."
With BBI at the helm of a bamboo renaissance, the future indeed looks green -- and pliable, just like the bamboo.
Labels: business, environment, people
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Thursday, May 19, 2005
Which Backstreet Boy is gay?
Finally, the truth comes out. Listen for yourself. (This one needs speakers.)
[via
bubu's blog]
Labels: humor, music, queer
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Monday, May 16, 2005
4:30 PM |
Here's Some Vitriol
I am so very tired.
You know when you're sick and nauseous, and you feel your body is about to give way and collapse --
but then you have a job to do, for a generous sum you can't say "no" to, so you pretend you are locquacious and alert and interested?
That, ladies and gentlemen, defines my whole morning. All of it, under 10,000 degree heat. And the strain of having to process information from three Germans speaking English in accents so thick you can see it curdle under the sun.
I've barely gotten over my bout of the flu over the weekend. Responsibilities overwhelm me. I just finished my last class for the day, and the last semblance of strength in my bones has left me.
I want to die. And frankly,
nobody understands me.Labels: life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Monday, May 09, 2005
5:26 PM |
The Look of Utter Boredom
The face is an interesting biographer, indeed.
Yup. This is me. From last week. With Sunday stubbles. Just to remind some faraway friends about how my face looks like.
Labels: life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, May 08, 2005
[see what's in my head...]The surest way to die is to inhale a thousand fingers of smoke and watch the fumes run over your body like a plague, and feel the clammy hand of death rip over you, and only then can you feel the vomit committing your brain to a single line of a sentence and then you don't really know what to do except to stare at the sun and the maggots suddenly covering it. All you see is the green of the body beside you, which is the smell of peptide and fish, and all you can really think about is the way the music washes over you as you swim through the promise of the shore and finally the boy you love tells you he is the whale that tells the waves to go easy on the cowboy on the beach because that is how the cojones tells the crab to fish the octopus which ate Jonah. One day, the sultan of crap went on a binge and then he told his wife of a tale of gold in the sand, which is really the truth behind the assassination of John Lennon. And so it goes that way. The frog and Cinderella part like friends watching Monday Night Football, and Tyra Banks can't really do anything except to stare at the sad night that appears before her like a plague of spaghetti, with the dentist yelling all sorts of obscenities as if his face is not obscene itself. The tooth, however, has fallen out from the crypt, and all that anyone could really think about is how the smell of the pus that came out of Moses's mouth is all the rage in Santander, that town where they burn witches for fiesta, because there is no food, only sardines ten thousand years old, and all of this is real, really, like the dream of goldfish Naya talks about in her poetry. So, there you go, the end of the longest night of the rest of your life. Hitchhiking through the muck, like it was an actor without work, only the television as salvation. And not only that: there is blessing in Freud's excuse for language, all the clocks and stopwatches in the world suddenly mute except for the tick of the mite that will destroy the mountain which is the blog of all discontent. So, he thanks the Lord for all that is sundry. And all that is fishy, even the gapless, toothy mellow young woman singing out love songs like lime and like crap; the way the light falls on her face... It is the very blessing of God, if God was a disco dancer strapped to a stiletto heel. What am I talking about? I am talking about the truth that there can be no one to stop you if all you do is wish and pray for the rays that will flood the earth, and only then can you know what it is like to taste the curry that will become any Indian's bandana. So there you go. Mentally insert all of that into your puny brain, and see if it doesn't explode.
Labels: writing
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Friday, May 06, 2005
7:48 PM |
In Praise of Mothers
[Something for Mother's Day...]Once each week, after I wake up from the utter, bright sunniness of most Sunday mornings, I make way for the one ritual that governs a life kept busy with the weight of bachelorhood and the demands of a semi-workaholic existence: I visit my mother who lives a few blocks up north from my apartment in Tubod.
We have lunch together -- sometimes with chicken curry, which is my favorite, and sometimes with Korean barbecue. Sometimes, she prepares salad made from fern leaves and marinated in coconut milk. We talk like giddy airheads about the celebrities we see on the television, gossip about Piolo Pascual, and such and such. Sometimes we scan through old pictures and rummage through a wealth of memories. She remembers her childhood in Bayawan well, and she remembers, too, the travails of her early adult life. Her stories have become the stuff of my very own fiction.
My visits are something I have surprisingly found myself looking forward to doing every week. Perhaps, I tell myself, it is a sign of years slowly edging off the brackets of youth. I am almost 30. In the gravity of adulthood, mothers become strange sources of comfort. We share the same birthday -- August 17 -- and this adds to this connection between us, knowing that we are yoked not just by flesh and blood, but also by the reckoning of our stars.
She lives in our house somewhere in Piapi, bordering Silliman Village, in a huge compound the parameters of which used to be lined with trees. (Now only the coconut trees are left, but devoid of their fruit, because my brother has complained to the neighbors that the falling coconuts are wrecking havoc on our property.) It's a big house, two-storeys in all, and something she shares with my 80-year old
lola, mother's aunt, who had raised her and my Auntie Fannie when they were girls growing up in the backwaters of old Bayawan.
The house has a veranda, and overlooks a garden Mother grew from the sheer effort of her hands; it is still something she waters every morning, after breakfast and prayers. On Sundays when I am there, her morning gives way to preparing something delicious for lunch for her youngest son (me); she waters the garden only when she comes home in the afternoon (while I'm in the back veranda snoozing in the bamboo divan under the late sun), after she visits and prays over the sick in the local provincial hospital -- something she has been doing every Sunday since as far back as I can remember. This should make her a saint, but then again, she is also given to her fits of passive aggression (an artform and negotiating tactic perfected by the shrewdest of Filipino mothers, I think) -- which is something that makes her more human, and indeed, more lovable, because imperfect.
And yet it is only now that I appreciate my mother more. Adulthood gives you that ability, I guess. Now that I have grown up and "flown the nest," so to speak, it is so much easier to see her as being more than just the provider for the most basic of needs. I have known her all my life as the woman who fought so many battles just to provide six growing boys three square meals every day. She has always been somebody who fought her way out of all certain obsolescence.
She has lived a very rich life. If only for that, I am already grateful for having known her. That I call her "mom" is a privilege.
When she was a young woman, she felt trapped by the narrow certainties of small town life. Bayawan in the 1940s did not exactly give any local girl the chance to become so much more, except perhaps the life of a housewife, or something completely banal (not that I'm saying a housewife's life is necessarily banal.)
She wanted to become a nurse. She wanted to live in the Big City.
While everybody else around her told her how "immoral" and "evil" the big city was, and how she would probably become lost in metropolitan quagmire, she only smiled back and fought to live her dream ...
by first making tira-tira, the local version of coconut candy. And selling them tirelessly, by the skin of her teeth.
She sold enough coconut candies, and saved enough money to gain her passage to Cebu where, with higher education still impossible for a woman of humble means, she apprenticed herself to a beautician, and learned the trade so well she became a very good one, and eventually opened her own shop later on in Bayawan, when she had already married my father, and both were running our
hacienda's sugar produce down South.
There is a picture I keep on my bureau, of her from those Cebu days. The studio portrait is in sepia, depicting a young, beautiful woman with an engaging smile, hair perfectly done in the style of those days, makeup mute and simple, but evenly accentuating what made her stand out: her clear eyes, almost almond-shaped, and her lips teased with rouge just right, she looked almost pouty. She has the palms of her hands pressed together, and she presses her right cheek against that, head tilted a bit upward to welcome the studio light, which makes her cheekbones prominent. "A movie star pose!" I used to tell her.
That photograph, displayed in the photographer's studio for days on end, earned her many marriage proposals -- one from a Muslim businessman who wanted to make her drink a
lumay, to whisk her away to his home in Mindanao. She escaped that possibility in her life, but still found her way to Mindanao, in Butuan, where she opened her own beauty shop in a building owned by a man who would soon be her husband and my father.
It wasn't always an easy life. She had wealth, yes -- and for a time, in the heady days of the 1970s when sugar made people kings and queens of excess and affluence in Negros Oriental, she was the perfect embodiment of the local Southern socialite. She was part of a gilded age, preserved only in old photographs kept in
kabans and torn photo albums. And when the price of sugar crashed, so did our fortunes -- and my mother was left to fend for a growing family: she sold
baye-baye (a Bayawan delicacy -- a cake made of coconut and sticky rice), she sold homemade peanut butter, she sold Avon, she sold everything. Once, selling
baye-baye door-to-door, she got sunstroke, and fell face-first on the sidewalk. "The one thought that made me get up, and made me alive," she would later admit to me, "was the fact that I needed to put food on the dinner table." We also have pictures of those hard years: the beautiful, young girl of the old sepia picture now gone, all disappeared into a sunburned, wrinkled middle-aged woman with a toothy smile.
Despite insurmountable hardship, she saw all her sons graduate from Silliman University. In turn, and perhaps even for her, we all tried to make names for ourselves, or at least seek our fortunes for her sake, to turn back the hands of fate, so to speak.
And how fortunes have changed! We still speak of things turning out as they have now as if they are borne out of miracles.
"And they are indeed miracles," mother usually insists. We do not disagree with her. Her eyes gleam with the wisdom of so much experience.
In the end, I know the virtues of beautiful strength and perseverance because of Mother: she is the living example of both. These are perhaps her greatest legacy. And her influence.
In time, as I go about my life finding "older" friends for their promise of maturity and reliable sense of persevering spirit, I have found mostly older women who are, not surprisingly, the very reflections of my own mother. Most of them are also mothers -- and women whose lives have touched me, and made my own more interesting.
There's my mentor
Ceres Pioquinto who believed in me when even I didn't believe in myself. She is wit and ferocious will personified. Under her tutelage, I flowered. Now, she is Germany, and I miss her tight, but always reassuring guidance. Sometimes I feel my life as an academic is all a mess just because she is not there to tell me what to do.
There's
Susan Vista-Suarez, music's magic friend, who inspires because she makes a talent from rising to greatness even after every fall.
There's
Marjorie Evasco, Susan Lara, and
Mom Edith Tiempo, whose selfless regard for young writers have made them "literary mothers." I, and so many others following their paths, hold their mentorship dearly, for all time.
There's
Margie Udarbe-Alvarez, who possesses such an uncanny sense of self -- and with all of that packaged in with so much formidable intelligence. And she knows how to make killer pot roast.
Perfection!There's Ma'am
Betty Abregana, whose sheer iron will and example still inspires so many, even after she left Silliman after helping steer the university down the superior path for a good number of years.
There's
Laurie Hutchison-Raymundo who inspires me with her unflagging energy. She is the Energizer Bunny, really. She shares my love for Monty Python, and makes the most technical marine biology anecdote sound like a humor-laden episode from
The Twilight Zone. She taught me a lot about the theater, and a lot more about reading people.
And then there are the best sisters-in-law in the world,
Daisy Relatado-Casocot and
Efeb Bustamante-Casocot, both amazing women, my brothers Dennis and Rocky are luckier to have them in their lives. There're also
Lily Caballes (my best friend Gideon's mother, and one of my mom's closest friends), my best lady friends
Jacqueline Pinero-Torres and
Kristyn Maslog-Levis,
Jocelyn de la Cruz, Myrish Cadapan-Antonio, Glenda Ramira-Fabillar, Juliet Padernal, Danah Fortunato, Irma Faith Pal, Rosario Maxino-Baseleres, Jackie Veloso-Antonio, Arlene Delloso-Uypitching, Batchiba Lacdo-o, Dessa Quesada-Palm, Cecilia Hoffman, Esther Windler, Andrea Soluta, Kitty Taniguchi, Sherro Lee Lagrimas, among so many other women I've known all my life, all of them strong, and each a testament of formidable spirit.
Thanks for the inspiration.
Happy Mother's Day to all you mothers in the world.
Labels: family, gender
[1] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Thursday, May 05, 2005
Frankly, I have no idea why my life is suddenly so busy. Now that I wake up quite early in the day (a former insomniac, I used to be The Ten O'clock Guy), I expected to have greater maneuvering space with my schedule --
but no. I'm actually busier. Every second seems to count, and every hour seems never enough to do everything I have to do. I also do all my errand on foot since I'm still sadly a hopeless pedestrian. I've never been this busy in my memory of the past two or three years. I go home from work roughly around 7:30 or 8:00 in the evening, and still I find myself having
tons of things to do. Maybe it's because my home computer's finally bitten the dust, and I can't do much of extra office work and personal writing assignments on my own time. But I like it. I am deadtired by day's end,
pero okay
lang. There's that sense of accomplishment around me that's quite addictive.
Gotta go. I have to research pa in the library about terra cotta art in Dumaguete.
Labels: life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
2:54 PM |
Sign of the Times
What the--! Do you see it? I hope you do. Do you suppose...?
Oh, well.[via nerve's
scanner]
Labels: humor
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
I have a strange feeling that it is only this summer that I have finally become what I should have been a few short years ago:
an adult. It's a combination of things: there is about me an ease with life and its questions, a sense of stability that keeps you afloat for most parts of the day, and a defnite knowing of what you want and what you can accomplish. I am so much more connected to my body, and my spirit can soar at the slightest invitation. And yet at the same time, there is that little voice from the back of my head that keeps my balance. It introduces itself as Experience. I give it its due welcome, and then I move on with the rest of the days. If this is the very symptom of nearing 30, I am loving my third decade already.
Advanced happy birthday to me!Labels: life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, May 01, 2005
I planned this for a very long time. To keep a certain Sunday meant only for the most hedonist of intentions. A celebration of indulgence, you could say. Something to reward an overstressed existence -- a kiss, really, for the self. That it happened to fall on a May 1 -- everyone's good ol' Labor Day -- is a fascinating coincidence; it perhaps underlined the fact that I needed the break from too much work which, I have been told, verges on slavery.
It cannot be helped. I like a life on the go. What I fear most, like I have told my closest friends, is boredom. "A truly intelligent person will never get bored," I once told Eric J. when we were newly-graduated from college, "he always finds something to amuse himself, or to keep his mind occupied." I'm not exactly sure if I meant that as gospel truth. Perhaps it was only collegiate blather. We are often driven to such "insights" when you're young and real life has not yet begun. But I have observed I do try to keep every single second occupied with something to do. That I have mellowed in later years is also something I have observed about my life. There are nights now that I would just wake up suddenly from a dream: I am the Energizer Bunny, and I have ran out of batteries.
M. has, of course, been griping about this tendency to break my back from sheer overwork. I know M. means well, and is actually quite sweet about it. "You work so damn hard for so little," he tells me all the time. He doesn't like it that he goes to bed with the last image of me as being that of a figure hunched over piles of what-not, over the kitchen table, with only lamplight to keep me company -- only to wake up to a brand new morning with me still going at it, the nth cup of coffee beside all those papers, a look of panic in my eyes. Sometimes he finds me with head down, sleeping away like there's no tomorrow, the stack of papers serving as my pillow. He tells me he can understand how this can be so, if it is only a once-a-month occurrence. But to be regular about it? M. tells me I am nuts. I do not disagree with him.
Maybe, I tell myself, the compulsion to work springs from the fact that my childhood still comes ringing back to me as some uncomfortable memory, the voices of old grade school classmates taunting me as
"Tapulan!" (Lazy!) I tell you, these phantom voices are still distinctly clear to me; they don't ever fade.
That I was a "lazy" kid is true, I think. I just didn't like punctuating every school day being forced to clean the classroom, my assignment being to scrub the dusty wooden floor with half a coconut husk. For any public school kid, this was how life ran every day. Mandatory janitorial services, packaged as training. (Does anyone still remember how your public school teachers treated you as their own indentured servants? "'Dong, buy us Coke." "'Day, sell this candies for me." "'Dong, 'Day, some Department of Education people are coming over tomorrow for an inspection. Tell your mothers to bring in some potted plants." But we never complained.) When I grew much older, I resolved to do something about why I was taunted as being "tapulan": the workaholic, thus, was an intentional creation. It has also taken over my life.
"You work so damn hard for so little." I know this to be the truth. So while I understand M.'s commiseration to be a fact, I've also long since believed that to work only just as much as I get paid will leave me terribly unfulfilled. Sad rumination aside, the balance of things seems to come from the fact that I know I have given good work, at least
most of the time. Sometimes, I wonder how much any student knows how hard teachers must work to feel true to the vocation. Sleepless nights for studying and paper-checking, of course, but also a sleeplessness coupled with that overwhelming sense of responsibility. Teaching -- especially the serious, advocating kind -- is not for the fainthearted, or the lazy.
So the day of indulgence began.
Quite late, and intentionally so. I've been used, for the past weeks now, to the alarm clock that has become my body, always ready for the rousing at seven o'clock sharp. I did wake up at that time, but only to glance at the gathering light outside, to greet myself "Good morning," and to promptly go back to sleep. I woke up around ten o'clock, watched a bit of television, read a few pages of Douglas Adams's
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy before the film version arrives in theaters to color my own imagination of the book, had lunch of tuna and wheat bread, and then took a slow shower to prepare for coffee at CocoAmigos, where I spend most Sundays drinking their (bad) brew. (They have all the major newspapers I can read for free, a worthy exchange for inexplicably vomituous coffee.)
Afterwards, I walked half a block to Body and Sole where I allowed myself to be body-scrubbed all over, the rubbing of the salt all over my skin like a gentle unpeeling of a life on the verge of a workaholic collapse. The oil made my skin feel like the softest of velvet, and that was enough to send me to a kind of heaven.
Later, another masseuse gave me a full-body massage, each effleurage and kneading of the hand unfolding the spots of stress that have camped all over, they've made my body their country.
The whole thing lasted most of the afternoon. Afterwards, I happily floated out of the place, my wallet a little lighter, but oh, so much worth it.
Everybody deserves a day of self-loving.
Tomorrow, after all, is another Monday. I can now say of the coming week promising of more work, "Bring it on,
baby."
Labels: life
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