Wednesday, August 06, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 251.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, August 03, 2025
9:00 AM |
The Confessions of Second Hand Rose
“Age changes you. The first half of my life, I wanted to be interesting to many people. Now as I am on the second half, I only want to be interested and invested in the lives of those who are still around.”
~ Gabe Mercado
At the beginning of my birthday month, where I will be turning 50, I cannot help but think inwards and wonder about the ways my life thus far has unfolded. From the vantage point of being half a century old, I see strengths. I see frailties—so much frailties. I see patterns. Definitely patterns. In the sum of it all, what I’ve had has indeed been a singular experience of me being me, warts and all, and barring regrets, which is a useless exercise. But that is everyone’s story, isn’t it? All our lives are singular experiences to ourselves, and we can only hope to derive at least the satisfaction of having lived through all that. Does that make sense?
By the time you’ve reached middle age, you see patterns in the ways you cycle through your days. Do you see patterns in your life thus far? I do. One pattern I see overwhelmingly is how I am the embodiment of the song “Second Hand Rose,” a 1921 tune written by Grant Clarke and James F. Hanley for Fanny Brice, and popularized by Barbra Streisand in the late 1960s. It’s a funny song where the persona complains about never getting things when they’re new, but always getting them second-hand—“Even clothes I’m wearing / Someone wore before!” she complains in the song.
This is the anthem of my life! Because, truth to tell, I mostly never get things firsthand; always second-hand—and to me, I’ve learned to be perfectly fine with that reality. I am, I daresay, a creature of the second place, the second wind, the second chance.
Most of us have some sort of landmarks to measure success in life. I have never subscribed to the common dream of pursuing a cycle of college graduation / corporate job / car / condominium / conjugal bliss / children / croaking. We all have different measuring sticks, but one such that I somehow subscribed to was academic excellence. But I remember that all throughout grade school, I never was a consistent honor student. My record was quite checkered: there was a fourth place finish in the honor roll in Grade 1, nothing at all in Grade 2, a third place finish in Grade 3, none in Grade 4, a second place finish in Grade 5—and then to my utter astonishment, I graduated valedictorian. How did that happen? That was my first experience as a Second Hand Rose.
That academic adventure continued. In high school, there were many classmates who were more brilliant than I was, and so I chose to pursue something I was at least good at—which was writing, and thus I became editor-in-chief for the school paper. I chose an idea of “excellence” in my own terms, I guess. The brilliant classmates I had—all of them women—were ultimately graduated with very high places in the honor roll, but somehow I also found myself the lone male in their company, but one who was quite satisfied with a fourth honorable mention.
In college, determined this time to excel, I became part of the pioneering batch of Physical Therapy students at Silliman University, but a searing soul-searching episode during my first hospital duty in junior year made me realize I was not cut out for the field. I had just battled a losing skirmish with getting ordinary vital signs from the first patient assigned to me, and once outside that patient’s hospital room, I stared down the corridor which was bathed in soul-sucking fluorescent lights—and I realized all this was not for me. So I shifted to Mass Communication, much to the dismay of my family who had already bought the dream of me as a future OFW in some hospital abroad. I was soon in my second course! And I was not in a hurry to graduate either, relishing my second life as a college student now freed from the specter of what seemed to be the wrong career path. Second choices, second lives for Second Hand Rose.
After enduring three years of a halfhearted pursuit for physical therapy training, I wanted to taste what it was like to study abroad, believing that the best time to travel is when you’re a college student. I subsequently applied for a competitive exchange scholarship in Japan. I didn’t get that—the psychological exam I was made to take pronounced me somehow unfit for the endeavor [shades of future mental health issues!], and the slot was given to someone else. I stewed heavily and felt like a loser. But by the next year, the scholarship office decided to award me the opportunity anyway—and I did spend a year as a student in Japan, my first time to live out of the country, and throughout that exhilarating year—I was 21—I gloried in my new experiences, but also cried every night because of terrible homesickness. [I must have cried all my homesickness away that year, because I never became homesick again in future travels.] Nevertheless, in my estimation, Second Hand Rose won.
I finished Mass Com but didn’t even become a journalist. Upon graduation, there was an offer of job with the Manila Bulletin, but I didn’t see myself as a newshound, going around the big city chasing leads. So I nixed that, and went to graduate school instead, belatedly embracing the possibilities of a creative writing career. And just like that, without design, I became a teacher—just as the world began changing in the shattering realities after 9/11.
I taught without a break for a decade after that, and really went earnestly into writing, winning two Palanca Awards in a row—both of them second prizes for the short story. [It would take a few more tries before I got a first prize finish.] I wrote and I taught without taking a break for many years, and finally I got terribly burned out in 2009, which was around the time I also broke with a long-term relationship. I remember almost quitting teaching. I partied hard in the late 2000s, enjoying a second bout of carousing gusto in my early thirties. A second adolescence for Second Hand Rose!
Eventually, tired of partying, I began looking to redefine my life again. Armed with my old idea of taking a break, I applied for an arts fellowship in the U.S., this one with the promise of a week’s stay in New York. I wanted to cure my burnout and heartbreak with skyscrapers and big city life—the anti-thesis of Dumaguete. I actually made it to the final rounds of consideration!—but ultimately, they chose someone else. I stewed again and felt like a loser. But the local administrator of that program [basically, the U.S. Embassy in Manila] soon reached out to me, and felt that I was suited for something else: a fellowship at the International Writing Program in Iowa. And this one lasted three months, plus trips to Chicago, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., aaaaand New York. Of course I said yes. Again, it was an instance of not getting what I applied for, but getting something better in return. It happens. Second Hand Rose won again.
[A digression: While I was studying in Japan, I applied for a tourist visa to visit my brother in Los Angeles. I got denied. I tried a second time a few years later, back in the Philippines. I once again got denied—and then exiting the consular offices, I remember being furious and I remembering cursing the American dream before I left the compound along Roxas Boulevard: “I will never ever apply for an American visa again! Someday, it will be you—U.S. Embassy—who will invite me!” Ten years later, it was in fact the U.S. Embassy who facilitated my first American sojourn in 2010. Hurrah for Second Hand Rose!]
After that fateful American fellowship, I returned home, published my first two books, and then became the founding coordinator of the Edilberto and Edith Tiempo Creative Writing Center—and to that I poured all my sweat and effort, and all my dreams. Plus I taught an insane overload of classes year after year after year. I was invariably told to entertain the idea of pursuing a Ph.D. abroad, but at the same I was retained as the only CW teacher in the department, and the only one teaching all the CW courses [except for poetry]—which proved confusing. Was I supposed to stay and teach, or go and pursue a higher degree? I somehow was made to feel that taking a sabbatical was not in the cards. By the time the pandemic came, I was ready for a burnout and a meltdown. I broke mentally. [Or at least the Zoom classes, and a bad bout of COVID-19, broke me.] I quit teaching, and I thought that was for good. I didn’t want to teach ever again. I became a social media manager instead.
Of course I spoke too soon. Because I’m back to teaching again, armed with lessons on how to navigate these things without me collapsing, or breaking. Is this, at 50, my second, third, or fourth wind? A friend I follow on X keeps posting the same message every day without fail: “Another day, another chance.” I heart his daily mantra every chance I get, because I believe in that wholeheartedly.
I think what I’m trying to get at in this long navel-gazing essay—cut me some slack, August is my birthday month and this is my birthday essay—is that [1] getting things secondhand is not a definition of who you are, and it’s just the way life is and how random it can be, and it is not fate; [2] getting second places is a good place to be, and first will eventually happen; [3] getting second wind means you are willing to rise above failures and try again; and [4] getting second loves [or third] and finally finding one that completes you means that, yes, you’ve kissed many frogs along the way but there will always be a Renz. Second chances are a gift.
I also believe that whenever I falter in the assorted challenges of my life, the one thing that makes me get up is the idea of persistence. Persistence is the secret formula: you do what you do best constantly and without fail, even with the occasional hindrances, even with occasional failures—you’ll get somewhere eventually. At fifty, I’d like to believe that everything I have accomplished and everything I have been awarded for is really because I have managed to persist. Even when I don’t believe in myself sometimes, even when I demonstrate spectacular failures, even when I disappoint myself and other people because of frailties that are undeniable parts of my shadow self, even when I feel discarded by forces beyond my control, even when I am at the brink of some sort of annihilation [sometimes of my own making] … I’ve somehow persisted.
That, and because I am always accommodating with every second chance [or third] that I’ve gotten.
Hello, August!
Labels: birthday, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Friday, August 01, 2025
10:00 PM |
Swans Descending in Dumaguete
My former journalism mentor in high school—she’s the current Dean of the College of Education at Silliman University—was effusive upon seeing Ballet Manila’s production of Swan Lake last week, on its final night at the Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium: “I was in tears when I left the Luce tonight, overwhelmed by a mix of emotions,” Dr. Gina Fontejon-Bonior wrote on Facebook. “I needed this moment at the Luce, immersed in an evening of love, beauty, and grace—after a long workweek, and a heartbreaking news about the health condition of someone I deeply care about. Salamat kaayo, Silliman University Culture and Arts Council, for bringing the artistic creation of Lisa Macuja-Elizalde back to Dumaguete, … for the breath of hope and grace.”
That kind of testimony lingers more than most, I think. More than actual reviews even—which is why I have opted to center this column with Dr. Bonior’s emotive impressions of the ballet. And how do I even begin to review Ballet Manila’s Swan Lake, with Ms. Macuja-Elizalde in her creative peak? I won’t even try. I will try to write about it in a different way.
You hold on to testaments like Dr. Bonior’s it like a talisman, something to pull out when the world begins to unravel. Because the truth is, we’re all slowly unraveling. And if the ache of ordinary life, like illness or bureaucracy or the grief that never leaves you, does not do you in, it’s the quiet despair that comes from scrolling endlessly through your phone in the dead of night, seeking feeling in a world too numbed out to offer it. And then a white bird flies across a hallowed stage in Dumaguete, pirouettes in anguish, and suddenly your chest opens.
What is it about Swan Lake?
It’s a ballet that, by all measures, should be a relic: composed in 1875 by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, borne out of the romanticism of a bygone era, stuffed with royal courts and enchanted lakes and girls turning into swans. But it survives, not just in gilded theaters in Moscow or London, but here in Dumaguete—under the shadow of acacia trees, where the salt of Bohol Sea clings to your skin even in the air-conditioned dark of the Luce.
It survives, I think, because it haunts us.
Because it is, at its core, a tragedy of transformation, of doomed love, of becoming something else entirely just to survive. And isn’t that what we all do? The ballerina, at the height of her dance, becomes the swan—and you forget that it is human limbs that tremble and leap and flutter. You see the feather, the wing, the pain of flight.
Lisa Macuja-Elizalde and Ballet Manila know this, embody this. And in Dumaguete, that knowledge is received not passively, but with deep and trembling gratitude. Here, I would like to believe that we are not jaded by art. Here, when a ballerina flutters to her death in a fog of heartbreak, someone in the back row weeps silently—and means it. [This is very true! In the performance that I saw, the audience I was with were rapturous when our swan leapt to its romantic demise!] Maybe that’s why Dumaguete is still the kind of city where a ballet like Swan Lake matters. Because we haven’t lost our capacity to believe in beauty. Or to mourn it.
As a teenage high schooler working for The Junior Sillimanian, I was taught by Dr. Bonior [always Ma’am Gina to me] to be precise in my reporting, to sum up a story best in a perfect opening paragraph. She taught me to feel with structured language. And now here she is, decades later, watching a girl in a tutu die for love and magic, and sobbing in the darkness. I think there’s poetry in that.
There’s a kind of redemption in being allowed to feel deeply. It doesn’t happen enough.
Maybe that’s what Swan Lake offers: not just its well-worn story of Prince Siegfried and the cursed Odette and her dark double Odile and the malevolent Von Rothbart, but the whole aching ritual of it. The careful discipline of classical ballet, with its merciless demands on the human body [Ballet Manila, for Dumaguete, did the unthinkable and danced a punishing total of six shows in a row in four days!], and its impossible grace. Every movement honed through pain. Every step a sacrifice. And yet, it is through that rigor a transcendence arrives.
Lisa Macuja-Elizalde, who once danced these roles herself, has now given her dancers the gift of that same transcendence that we, in Dumaguete, got to witness, which is nothing short of a blessing. A miracle, even. Because we are far from the cultural centers of the country. We do not have the reach of Manila, or the glitter of CCP galas. But we have the Luce. We have the Silliman University Culture and Arts Council and its indefatigable leader, Diomar Abrio, with his stubborn devotion to the idea that Silliman University and Dumaguete deserve to see the best this country has to offer. That we are not too small. That art is not a luxury—it is the lifeline.
And so this is why Swan Lake endures, at least for us. Not because of nostalgia, but because of its ability to speak to us across centuries and geographies, across languages and generations. It tells us that love can redeem, even if too late. That betrayal can destroy, but also set one free. That sometimes, becoming a swan is the only way to escape.
And here, in this seaside university town where students still write poetry on napkins in cafés, where strangers say thank you after watching a play, where grief is softened by music echoing from the Rizal Boulevard, Swan Lake finds an audience that doesn’t just watch—but listens. Feels. Believes.
So yes, bring back Odette to our stage. Let her dance again and again in our city. Let her leap and fall, rise and vanish. We will always watch. We will always weep. And somewhere in that act, in that collective surrender to beauty, we are healed. Even if just for one night. Because in Dumaguete, Swan Lake doesn’t end with a curtain call. It stays.
Labels: art and culture, ballet, cultural affairs committee, dance, dumaguete, luce, silliman
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Thursday, July 31, 2025
11:25 PM |
Thank You for 39 Great Years, Chuck!
What a beautiful film Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck is. But for one to get its beauty, the film does demand concentration or attention. It’s disjointed in all the right ways and mysterious in many places. It contains echoes of details you will have to surrender to in order to believe, and limns the sweet without succumbing to the saccharine.
There were chunks of the runtime where I was just smiling like I was nuts — most of it when people onscreen were dancing. The dances! You will love the dances.
It’s about the end of the world, and how everything, even the stars, just goes out in a whimper. It’s about beholding mortality and what you choose to do with your waking moments. It’s about choosing to dance, because the beat of life is just inescapable. It’s about knowing that you are wonderful, that you deserve to be wonderful, and that you contain multitudes.Labels: death, film, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, July 30, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 250.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, July 27, 2025
9:00 AM |
In Defense of Fictional Mess
Some time ago, it was Rory Gilmore. For the past three years or so, it has been Carrie Bradshaw. The cycle goes on, and there are fresh targets now and then being pilloried in the dark recessed of TikTok, X, and YouTube: Meredith Grey, or Olivia Pope, or—let’s be honest—any woman in fiction who dared to be messy, to be layered, to be human.
I think we have reached the era of the Digital Inquisition, where every fictional woman is put on trial, their sins collected like receipts and tallied on social media, their worthiness as characters weighed against an impossible moral scale.
Exhibit A: Rory slept with a married man.
Exhibit B: Carrie was selfish and inconsiderate to her friends.
And on and on.
The tone is always gleeful, smug, as though someone has finally solved the puzzle of why this character is problematic—and therefore must be thrown into the pit.
What is this need to reduce women characters to lists of their failures, stripped of context and complexity? It’s like watching someone read Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and saying, “Well, she shouldn’t have had an affair then.” You’d be laughed out of any serious literature class. And yet this same behavior is considered incisive cultural criticism on the internet.
I’ve seen this happen over and over again, and it feels eerily familiar. It’s not that different from the small-town tsismis we all know: the kind of gossip that isn’t content with shades of grey but demands black and white, saints and sinners. That neighbor who used to be so polite? Oh, didn’t you hear? She once left her child alone in the car for five minutes to run into Mercury Drug. Terrible mother. Cancelled. This is the same energy, just with a glossier filter and a wider audience.
I often wonder what we want when we consume fiction these days. We say we want complex characters—flawed, human, real—but the moment they exhibit the very messiness that makes them interesting, we slap a label on them and throw them away.
“Toxic.”
“Narcissist.”
“Red flag.”
Words that once had precise meanings now just serve as aesthetic judgments in character assassination posts.
And I can’t help but notice that this happens disproportionately to women characters. When Walter White spirals into murder and meth and monstrosity, we call him a tragic antihero. When Don Draper sleeps his way through Manhattan with the emotional intelligence of a bar of soap, we study him. We analyze. We marvel at the storytelling. But when Carrie Bradshaw does something dumb—like, say, leave Aidan for Mr. Big—we call her irredeemable. Not misguided. Not emotionally stunted. Just irredeemable.
What is that if not misogyny dressed up as media literacy?
There’s an emptiness in this impulse. A refusal to sit with discomfort. Maybe we’re so used to curating perfection online—every tweet polished, every selfie filtered—that we can no longer tolerate messiness in others, even fictional ones. It’s a kind of hyper-morality that isn’t interested in redemption, or growth, or contradiction. It just wants to assign blame and move on. Like a moral accountant tallying sins in a spreadsheet.
But where’s the pleasure in perfection?
Honestly, what is the point of watching a character who does everything right? Who never slips up, never makes a bad decision, never says something selfish, never hurts someone by accident or on purpose? That’s not a character. That’s a cardboard cutout in a Sunday School pamphlet.
Real stories live in the mess. In the contradictions. In the quiet failures and loud mistakes. In the long arc of someone who doesn’t get it right the first time, or even the fifth. This is where we see ourselves. Because let’s be honest: no one on this planet fits the checklist of moral purity. You? Me? That girl from Gen Z with the infographic on “Why Rory Gilmore is Actually a Monster”? None of us. And yet we demand from our fiction what we cannot live up to in our own lives.
I think often about what it means to be a reader, a viewer, an audience in this moment. And maybe it means learning to sit with the uncomfortable. To look at Carrie Bradshaw and say, “God, she’s insufferable,” but also, “Wow, she’s real.” To recognize in Rory Gilmore the fragile dreams of girlhood curdling into something selfish and still feel a pang of heartbreak, not righteousness.
Stories are meant to disturb us sometimes. Characters are meant to disappoint us. That’s the contract. That’s what makes them stay with us long after the screen fades to black or the book closes.
So no, I will not hate these characters because a Twitter thread told me to. I will not participate in this flattening of fiction into a moral binary where we root for saints and burn the rest. I will, instead, keep loving the difficult women [and men] of the screen and page, because they are reflections of our most human selves.
And if that makes me a bad feminist, then so be it. At least I still know how to read.
Labels: art and culture, culture, fiction, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Saturday, July 26, 2025
3:53 PM |
Mo’s Literary Lunch of Second Acts
There is a peculiar myth we like to tell ourselves about life, and the way it unfolds to us in a single, linear trajectory: birth, education, work, success, retirement, death. But real life, like good fiction, rarely obeys the tyranny of the straight line. Life spirals, life collapses, life restarts. And somewhere in that unexpected loop lies the second act, or even a third one—something that is redemptive, often frightening, always exhilarating. They are new chapters where everything changes.
Second acts are the province of reinvention. They are what we choose when the first act either fails us or fulfills us too quickly. Let’s say, a woman who once defined herself through motherhood, making a return to painting. Let’s say, a corporate man who abandons his cushy privileges to open a small café by the sea. Let’s say, a writer, silenced for years, finds her voice again after heartbreak. These are stories not just of crisis, but also of courage. They are narratives of listening to the quiet hunger inside all of us that the world tells us to ignore.
In literature, the second act is often the richest. It is where the protagonist is undone and then remade. Think of Elizabeth Gilbert shedding her life in Eat, Pray, Love, or Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, stepping into the unknown. In second acts, we lose certainty, but we also gain character. We discover not who we were told to be, but who we are willing to become.
We speak of literature in this particular case because we were invited not too long ago to a literary lunch that had as its theme the subject of “second acts.” The instigator for that special meal last June 28 was a friend, Mohammad Malik, a Pakistani who has, since the pandemic, found a home in Dumaguete—a young retiree from the hustle of corporate life who has since become a sometime poet and a full-time farmer [and slow food enthusiast] whose stead is found in the foothills of Valencia.
The small gathering was of friends as well. There was Esther Windler and son Ramon. There was the visual artist Hersley-Ven Casero and filmmaker wife Toulla Mavromati, who came with another visual artist Paul Benzi Florendo. There were the both of us, Ian and Renz, joined in by Mo’s significant other Finola Uy, and Mo’s righthand woman and all-around genius, Ana Maria Danid, whose hands prepared the luncheon. When we arrived at Mo’s farm, we found Ana at the dirty kitchen in front of the house, busy tending the burning firewood as well as the calderos, bubbling with steam, above the fires’ tongues.
Mo greeted us at the door with platters of appetizers and pitchers of drinks—and we opted for a cup of hot coffee [for Renz], and a glass of iced kamote tops juice [for Ian]. On a plate on the kitchen counter, we found pan de bisaya with kesong puti and garlic honey—and over these overflowing appetizers, everyone was abuzz with greetings and conversation. But soon we settled for the luncheon itself, Mo calling us over to the dining table, where we sat at our designated spots with placeholders drawn with each of our names.
And then the literary lunch began with Mo reading from an essay he has written for the occasion, titled “Second Act”: “In the realm of storytelling,” he read, “the second act plays an important role in the development of the plot. Whereas the first act normally involves world-building—introducing us to the protagonist, understanding her motivations, and setting up the conflict or challenge that must be overcome, the second act is where things really start to unfold: the plot thickens, tension builds, and through a series of obstacles and challenges thrown our way, we see the main character step up and advance closer to her goals.”
Mo told us about leaving his corporate job in Manila in 2019, and arriving in Dumaguete with no plan, “just dreams.” “My first act was centered around the universal question, what is the meaning of My Life? … I experienced boom and bust relationships. I tested the boundaries of authority. There was joy and grief, experiments in living that ended in success and in failure… It usually takes a dramatic turn of events for a story to enter into a second act… When I left my job and the big city [for Dumaguete], I didn’t know with certainty what I wanted to do, but I had a general vision of what was important: I wanted to have a control of my own time; I wanted to live a creative life, to do creative things; I wanted to spend time in and around a natural setting; I wanted to prioritize physical and emotional well-being.”
He also said he had an intuition that food would play an important role in that second act. He learned how to grow and cook local produce for their health benefits, and soon food became a medium for him to explore other parts in his life. He learned more about the differences and similarities of his home [Pakistani] culture and Filipino culture. He found that home-cooked Filipino food can be lean and delicious and chockful of vegetables. He learned to befriend other enthusiasts for local cuisine. Food sparked his passion for this new life. Which was why he wanted to solidify that intuition with this luncheon with friends—and he did so with full assist from Ana Maria Danid, who left a life in Bulacan to join Mo in his new chapter in Dumaguete. This is also her second act.
Mo and Ana’s main entrée for our noontime meal was a delightful surprise: fried inun-unan, or pritong paksiw na isda. “I can’t think of a better way to introduce myself than through a recipe that I learned from my mother,” Ana revealed. “Pritong paksiw is a clever way to use your leftover paksiw na isda. The flavor is deeper because it was cooked one day earlier, and when you fry it, it somehow becomes fresh again. So, with one dish, you have now enjoyed two different meals!”
This was the concept of “second acts” personified in a dish!
Ana first simmered a whole tamarong in a stew spiced with ginger, black peppercorn, laurel, and siling espada. Then she added sukang paombong—vinegar from the sap of the nipa palm—which gave the inun-unan a distinct sweet tang. After the fish absorbed the sharp vinegar flavor, it was battered with cassava starch and then fried until crispy.
The crispy batter and skin contrasted with the tender flesh inside, a mellow sourness prodding our mouths to salivate. Served beside the dish was a sawsawan with the sukang paombong as the base, mixed with minced onion, garlic, and siling labuyo to liven up the vinegar, and muscovado and diced cucumber to tame it. Sautéed mustard greens and pechay freshened up the table, with crispy fried garlic chips offering a punch of bitter sweetness.
We ended the meal with a white chocolate strawberry mousse cake topped with crushed Oreos. The rich creamy mousse paired well with a warm brew of mint and butterfly pea flower tea. A roll of pili nut turon was passed around the table for a clean nutty bite.
We closed the luncheon with Mo handing over to us a zine to commemorate the lunch, which contained the essay he read at the beginning, as well as Ana’s recipe for the fried inun-unan.
Second acts are invigorating circumstances, we realized. There is, of course, fear when we confront it, but to begin again is really to risk. It is to admit that we are still unfinished. But perhaps that is the most human thing of all — this refusal to be fixed in place, this insistence that even at 40, or 60, or 80, a new story is still possible. For Mo, it was possible. For Ana, it was possible.
In a culture obsessed with youth and early success, second acts remind us that time is not our enemy but our canvas. That sometimes, it is only after the intermission—after the job ends, after the separation, after the silence—that we can finally begin to speak in our own voice.
Mo’s lunch taught us to honor the second act, to see it not as failure, but as freedom. Mo’s lunch made us understand that the self is a draft, constantly revised, and that the truest stories, like the truest lives, do not end at the first plot twist, but bloom in the pages, or in the next meals, that come after.
[Written with Renz Torres for Culinary Cuts]
Labels: dumaguete, food, life, literature, writers
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, July 23, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 249.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, July 16, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 248.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, July 09, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 247.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Monday, July 07, 2025
2:34 PM |
Paul Palmore Returns!
CATCH THIS ONE OF A KIND THEATRE EVENT ON WEDNESDAY! In his first work as a come-backing theatre artist, Paul Palmore directs and presents a collaborative work with Dessa Quesada-Palm, Alex Cerra, Mayumi Maghuyop, Iniaki Montenegro, and Fionabelle Marie Cabe doing excerpts from James McLure's Laundry Room and Bourbon and Michael Cristofer's The Shadow Box, the JULY 9, Wednesday at 7 PM at the Woodward Little Theatre, Silliman University, Dumaguete City! FREE ADMISSION [but donations will be appreciated].
Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, silliman, theatre
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, July 02, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 246.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Monday, June 30, 2025
8:44 PM |
All About Tenderness
I mean to share this earlier in June for Pride Month, but life ... got in the way. Better late than never! But I was moved by Mark Fermill's [ IG: @markfermill ] recommendation for Talk Bookish to Me PH [ IG: @talkbookishtomeph ] of my book DON'T TELL ANYONE: LITERATE SMUT [from Anvil Publishing: IG: @anvilpublishing ]. There's some sex in it, yes, but the book is really a distillation of what I know about heartbreak, about loving, and about longing, done in the most tender way I can write about all these. That he highlighted two of my favorite stories from my own end of the book is also a kind of affirmation for me. I cried when I wrote “Compartments.” I was exorcising all my heartbreaks when I wrote “The Boys From Rizal Street.”
You can order the book from Lazada at this link.Labels: books, love, Pride, queer
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, June 29, 2025
9:18 AM |
A Life of Culture
This is an expanded version of my acknowledgment speech at the Outstanding Dumagueteño Awards, given last June 28 at Brooke’s Place in Batinguel, Dumaguete.
To be invited to speak on behalf of the honorees in the Artists and Entertainers category of the Outstanding Dumagueteño Awards feels like standing at the threshold of history and memory. And it feels both so fitting and intimidating, perhaps simply because I know these people throughout my whole career as a cultural worker and have championed many of their works. These are people I have worked with, admired, written about, or simply held in reverence.
The theatre artist Evelyn Rose Aldecoa, who directed me in three unforgettable plays, taught me the rhythms of performance and community.
The poet Merlie Alunan is one of my literary mentors, and continues to guide me in collecting the folk literature of our province, helping us hold onto the fragile strands of our cultural memory.
When I found the films of screenwriter and film director Cesar Jalandoni Amigo, who died in 1987, I tried to give them light again in articles I have written about him and in screenings I try to do of his films, knowing that every frame of his cinema was a testament to his quiet genius.
The visual artist Hersley-Ven Casero is my most frequent collaborator. He has done the illustrations of most of my books, and I actually curated his first solo exhibit more than a decade ago. I am always drawn to the artistry he creates with his lens, which has chronicled the beauty and everyday wonders of our city, and I see as an artist who sees the world in textures we often miss.
I spent some time with the filmmaker Eddie Romero before he died in 2013. His stories for me moved beyond the screen into the national consciousness, and one of the highlights of my cultural work last year was curating the exhibit dedicated to his life and works at the National Museum of the Philippines in Dumaguete.
Edith Lopez Tiempo—Mom Edith—whose wisdom and grace launched countless literary careers, including my own, is the light we continue to follow.
I do not know Boboy Garovillo personally—but I feel like I do, given that almost all of us here have grown up with the songs of APO Hiking Society, their music inscribed in our hearts and has become our very definition of the best of OPM. That I have been chosen to be in their ranks humbles me, because I am first and foremost a rabid admirer of their creative life and a champion of their works.
You will notice that among all the categories in the current iteration of the Outstanding Dumagueteño Awards, our category has the biggest number of honorees. This underlines what for me is the biggest and often unacknowledged truth about Dumaguete: that it is in fact a city of the arts and culture—and every means should be done by our LGU to highlight that truth, through education, through tourism, through policy. In the first iteration of this award, in 1998, only one artist was actually honored: Canuto Villariza, a musician and songwriter who brought us “Dumaguete [Do You Hear Me Calling?” Today, more than 25 years later, Dumaguete has honored eight individuals—and among us we have two National Artists in fact! We need to embrace this, and nurture a city that is friendly to its artists.
I do hope that the Outstanding Dumagueteño Awards will become an annual honor, because we have so many artists and cultural workers who deserve this distinction. Francisco Sevilla Banogon, Rene Armogenia, and Dean Sinco for architecture and interior design. Cornelito Aro, Kitty Taniguchi, Jose Laspiñas, Paul Pfeiffer, Maria Taniguchi, and Muffet Dolar Villegas for visual arts. Luis Sinco for photography. Artemio Tadena, Cesar Ruiz Aquino, Myrna Peña-Reyes, Edilberto Tiempo, Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas, Bobby Flores Villasis, Elsa Martinez Coscolluela, Lakambini Sitoy, and Eva Rose Washburn-Repollo for literature. Priscilla Magdamo-Abraham, Elizabeth Susan Vista-Suarez Emmanuel B. Gregorio, Jay Cyrus Villanueva, and Enchi for music. Junix Inocian and Andy Bais for theatre. Lucy Jumawan-Sauer for dance. Dennis Trillo and Glydel Mercado for film. Tingting Delfin, Isabel “Boom” Roxas, Jeanne Ong, Digna Coo, Fred Quimat, Amir Sali, Alexis Monsanto, and Rajo Laurel for fashion design. And these are only just a few that I can remember.
We speak often of progress in terms of roads and buildings and markets. But true progress lies also in the art we create, in the songs we write, in the stories we tell each other when the lights go down and we gather in darkened theaters to remember that we are human. It is in these moments that we learn empathy, find courage, discover ourselves anew. The arts are not a luxury but a lifeline. They keep the soul of a community alive.
I hope this awards tradition continues, and that every year we pause to remember the artists and cultural workers who labor often in silence, sometimes in obscurity, to bring beauty into our lives. Their work is the work of spirit, of heart, of community.
Some might ask: why honor the arts when the world is beset with crisis? Why spend time celebrating when we are surrounded by hardship? The answer is simple. Art is our response to darkness, our stubborn refusal to give in to despair. It reminds us of the beauty still possible. It gives voice to the voiceless, gives shape to the dreams we hold close at night, lets us imagine a better world. And we gather here tonight not just to give medals but to affirm our collective belief that culture matters, that artists matter, that our stories matter.
On behalf of my fellow honorees, thank you for this recognition. We dedicate it back to the community that made us, to Dumaguete whose gentle spirit continues to nurture our own. May we all continue to live a life of culture, because in the end, it is the only life truly worth living.
Archiving a digital copy of the Pasidungog 2025: The 2nd Outstanding Dumagueteño Awards programme:
Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 245.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, June 22, 2025
9:00 AM |
The Weight of the World
The dictionary definition of malaise is that it is “a general feeling of discomfort, illness, or uneasiness whose exact cause is difficult to identify.” From the brain fog I am in, I consider that very carefully, and think through the murk: yes, that’s exactly it—that’s the fugue I’ve been flailing in since I arrived back from Singapore a few weeks ago. I wanted my return from that trip to mark some kind of refreshed start, a clean reboot of the self. But instead, a few days into my arrival in Dumaguete, I got sick. Flattened by something suspiciously COVID-like, probably the new strain that everyone’s whispering about again but refusing to name out loud, as though we’re too exhausted to even fear properly.
That unexpected illness floored me. The days in early June were a blur of fevered dreams, sore muscles, and the desperate awareness of breath, and suddenly the world receded into muffled silence. I recovered eventually, or at least the body did what bodies are designed to do—it carried on. But something else stayed. Something stubborn, low-humming, and disorienting. Something I have come to recognize as “malaise.”
Not the dramatic kind. No weeping on the floor, no screaming into the abyss. Just this quiet slippage of self into a fog where nothing feels anchored. It’s as if I’ve misplaced the coherence of my life, and I don’t know where to look for it. I try to read a book, and the words swim away. I sit down to write, and the blank page stares back at me, unimpressed. The days blend together. I avoid calls. I forget to reply to messages. I move through the house like a ghost haunting his own life.
At first I told myself it was just physical fatigue, the tail end of an illness’ wreckage. But as the weeks rolled on, and my body grew strong enough to lift grocery bags and climb stairs again [I even managed to do my part as a resident panelist of the 63rd Silliman University National Writers Workshop for one complete week], the fog still didn’t lift. That’s when I realized it wasn’t just my body that had been infected. My spirit, too, had caught something—something darker and harder to shake. A kind of existential weariness. A deep, gnawing ennui. I know ennui well.
And when I interrogate the shape of that ennui, I see it plain as day: it’s really the world, and all the dirt we are caked in. It’s the politics that seep into every crevice of our lives, choking beauty, distorting truth. It’s the endless cycles of betrayal in the headlines, the impunity, the hypocrisy, the spinning of narratives so brazen that gaslighting feels like air. And it’s the art we try to make in the midst of all this—art that cannot help but be affected by the political, even when all we want is to simply tell a story, to nurture culture, to capture a feeling, to make something true.
But I won’t kid myself. The act of making art is no longer a neutral act. In this time, in this country, in this fraught global moment, to make art—especially art that speaks—is to wade into a battlefield. Everything is coded. Everything can be weaponized. Silence can be complicity. Expression can be read as sedition. A simple poem can be torn apart for what it did not say, or for what it dared to.
And yet all I want—if I am being honest—is to live a fruitful life of culture. To write what I must write. To teach what I love. To read a good book. To mount a play. To celebrate a painting. To attend a concert and feel joy bloom in my chest. To do these things without the constant noise of politics and the havoc it brings. But how do you do that in a world where even breathing feels like a stance?
The simple answer is: you can’t. Not entirely.
But maybe the better answer is: you do it anyway.
You write the story, even if the world is burning. You stage the play, even if the theatre is falling apart. You curate the exhibit, even if funding is scarce and freedom scarcer. You teach the class, even when students are too distracted by the collapse of everything to listen. You do it knowing that it “matters.” Knowing that every act of culture is also an act of resistance—not necessarily against a regime or an ideology, but against despair.
Because that’s the real enemy, isn’t it? Not just the politicians, or the trolls, or the systems of oppression we all navigate. The real enemy is the part of us that wants to give up. That whispers, “What’s the point?” That tells us the fog will never lift. But there is a point. There is always a point.
I used to believe we make art to make sense of the senseless. I used to believe we make art to stay alive, to find meaning, to dream another world into being. I used to believe we make art to remind ourselves—and others—that we are still here. That we feel. That we refuse to go numb. I badly need to believe in all of this again.
So this is what I tell myself on these doldrum days when the malaise continues and wraps itself around my chest like a wet shroud: write something. Anything. Like this "essay" you can barely write. Let the cultural work you do be the quiet rebellion it has always been.
But I am still tired. The fog still lingers. In these small acts of a little bit of writing, I hope I can find a way through. Maybe, for now, hoping and a bit of writing is enough.
Labels: life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, June 18, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 244
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, June 11, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 243.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, June 04, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 242.
Labels: philippine literature, poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, May 28, 2025
7:00 AM |
Poetry Wednesday, No. 241.
Labels: poetry
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
GO TO OLDER POSTS
GO TO NEWER POSTS
