[The Benildean December 2007 issue]
A paperback has always functioned as an article of comfort for me.
At age eight, an abridged copy of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist bailed me out of the agonizing probability of being the hangdog in an afternoon of hopscotch with physically-able six graders in trainer bras.
At fourteen, to my parents’ happy consolation, I substituted booze and loco weed with Jane Eyre’s gothic-romantic melodramas.
Suicidal Sylvia Plath, paradoxically, resuscitated me from the black hole of college atrocities and slapped me back to a pink life of hope.
Not to mention that a paperback—especially that one about a wheat-haired prince with a rose-princess—has always been my favorite bedfellow.
One bookstore break, a sad panorama left me wishing for an immediate woe hero: A pile of paperbacks were thrown together in a sorry heap with a red ampersand looming over their paper-faces like a Maoist despot.
Ernest Hemingway was cheek to cheek with Geoffrey Chaucer and spawns of JD Salinger were crowding a Dim Sum How-To on the suicide-ledge of a bookshelf. Other literary paperbacks, with their creased leaves and waning colors, portrayed themselves to me as wretched casualties of a lost war—A sad portrait of the realism of literary regression.
The other books in discussion—the ones by Harriett Beecher Stowe, Virginia Woolf and even the Sweet Valley Twins included (Suck it up, literary snobs)—were on sale for a miserable
P 50.00.
With a gray, glum heart, I decided to deliver Hemingway and bagged two copies of Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, which would have been appropriate if only my imaginary friend preferred Hemingway (apparently, he only fancies the closet at daytime and scaring the maid on a regular basis).
On a serious note, I could not stomach how bookstores could stomach retailing classics for a pathetic P 50.00 and more so, how people prefer brainless boob tube shows over a good read.
Bookstores hold thousands of classic titles which they dispose of in a year or two should the books in question flopped among the purported bookstore buffs (who, is safe to say, raid the shelves generally for gel pen purchases).
Each time I carry out my obligatory rounds at the literature sections of a bookstore, William Shakespeare would be bleeding in melancholy with his tragedies. Mute and uncomplaining at aisle H-I for Socrates knows how long, Thomas Hardy remains like his humble Jude: obscure.
Literary masterpieces like distinguished Science discoveries of then and beyond deserve high regard for the simple reason of brilliance.
And I shall ache and ache for my paperback loves.
***
Sen. Antonio Trillanes III is wretched with a delusion of grandeur.
Mr. Grandiose thought that the 11 million voters who sat him in senate shall string along when he promenaded the Makati avenue along with military men backers one dog day Thursday.
The high-flying lieutenant of cool spoke of his latest insubordination as a “moral obligation” in a half-baked mutiny plot staged at the posh Peninsula hotel where miserable guests were forced to the streets carting luggage and The Pen staff sobbing with agonizing disheartenment (redundancy, intentional).
When the grandiloquent big-talker resolved to yield to the authorities, he suddenly morphed into a bashful, clammed-up lamb.
Ha, ha!
The government, in the aftermath of the botched mutiny of the two-time mutineer, implemented a temporal curfew which miffed (and home-bounded) the booze-gulping nocturnals.
Ha!
***
The Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) knocked down fully developed trees along Quezon Avenue to give way to a proposed road widening development.
The doomed green beings crammed the concrete avenue sidewalks, reminiscent of a sad picture of a bloodbath.
Trees are kind.
So, why?
Monday, December 3, 2007
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
On turning ten
[October-November 2007 issue, The Benildean]
You always admire what you really don't understand.
--Blaise Pascal
The scholarly philosophers of who-could-care-less would reason that ignorance is the origin of fear; in actuality, a sincere stupidity masquerading, in a sheep’s clothing, as plain harmless innocence.
Still, I have faith in the philosophy that ignorance is bliss.
At age four, I thought that the Cheez Whiz fairy really lived beneath the Cheez Whiz pot label.
As a child, I hated the gloppy, sodium-laced pseudo cheese junk that is Cheez Whiz. Playacting as my yellow hell in a bottle, Cheez Whiz has ruined innumerable lunch hours and birthday blow-outs. It counted as one of my many childhood saboteurs of fun—alongside obnoxious cough syrups and playtime cornstarch powder—that aroused the tantrums I curb within the four walls of my four-year-old head.
However, I recall feeling especially high-strung whenever my mother brings home a bottle of Cheez Whiz for my unfortunate sandwich school lunches. The glee is rooted from the happy thought that I have yet another opportunity to take prisoner the Cheez Whiz fairy that lived beneath the Cheez Whiz pot label.
I'd rip the label off each time and think: She hides pretty well.
The urban legend of swallowed citrus seeds lodging their roots into the walls of your gut enthralled me more than the blah fairy-tales of Disney princesses clad in bed sheet-gowns. I imagined having an orange tree breed slowly beneath my skin, with its red-yellow fruits cheek to cheek with my otherwise maroon heart. The resentful nanny swore the branches would begin to crawl out of my ears before I am ten. Of course, I waited for that one momentous occasion in vain.
At age six, I thought that Batibot* was an actual place filled with peculiar looking humans with patchwork brains and prosthetic noses; some quiet little town that my mother just could not locate with her car, despite the fact that she had the brains, ability and gas money to locate all the godforsaken Shoe Marts mushrooming in the metropolis.
And then I grew up to be nine and began realizing that Kuya Bodgie* is too happy for a middle-aged man—his method of eternal kindliness was so original, I remember how no adult in my childhood existence was too willing to smile sympathetically whenever I skip my afternoon nap. Mostly any virtual thing made my middle-aged father yell. Kuya Bodgie, I thought, must be bluffing it too perfectly.
At ten, I unlearned, gradually, the lies of special effects and the many fish stories of television and bed time fairy-tales.
And I learned not to trust and to stop believing.
***
This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.
It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.
--Billy Collins, On turning ten
*Batibot is the Philippines' equivalent to Sesame Street.
*Kuya Bodgie is Batibot's most famous host.
You always admire what you really don't understand.
--Blaise Pascal
The scholarly philosophers of who-could-care-less would reason that ignorance is the origin of fear; in actuality, a sincere stupidity masquerading, in a sheep’s clothing, as plain harmless innocence.
Still, I have faith in the philosophy that ignorance is bliss.
At age four, I thought that the Cheez Whiz fairy really lived beneath the Cheez Whiz pot label.
As a child, I hated the gloppy, sodium-laced pseudo cheese junk that is Cheez Whiz. Playacting as my yellow hell in a bottle, Cheez Whiz has ruined innumerable lunch hours and birthday blow-outs. It counted as one of my many childhood saboteurs of fun—alongside obnoxious cough syrups and playtime cornstarch powder—that aroused the tantrums I curb within the four walls of my four-year-old head.
However, I recall feeling especially high-strung whenever my mother brings home a bottle of Cheez Whiz for my unfortunate sandwich school lunches. The glee is rooted from the happy thought that I have yet another opportunity to take prisoner the Cheez Whiz fairy that lived beneath the Cheez Whiz pot label.
I'd rip the label off each time and think: She hides pretty well.
The urban legend of swallowed citrus seeds lodging their roots into the walls of your gut enthralled me more than the blah fairy-tales of Disney princesses clad in bed sheet-gowns. I imagined having an orange tree breed slowly beneath my skin, with its red-yellow fruits cheek to cheek with my otherwise maroon heart. The resentful nanny swore the branches would begin to crawl out of my ears before I am ten. Of course, I waited for that one momentous occasion in vain.
At age six, I thought that Batibot* was an actual place filled with peculiar looking humans with patchwork brains and prosthetic noses; some quiet little town that my mother just could not locate with her car, despite the fact that she had the brains, ability and gas money to locate all the godforsaken Shoe Marts mushrooming in the metropolis.
And then I grew up to be nine and began realizing that Kuya Bodgie* is too happy for a middle-aged man—his method of eternal kindliness was so original, I remember how no adult in my childhood existence was too willing to smile sympathetically whenever I skip my afternoon nap. Mostly any virtual thing made my middle-aged father yell. Kuya Bodgie, I thought, must be bluffing it too perfectly.
At ten, I unlearned, gradually, the lies of special effects and the many fish stories of television and bed time fairy-tales.
And I learned not to trust and to stop believing.
***
This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.
It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I could shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.
--Billy Collins, On turning ten
*Batibot is the Philippines' equivalent to Sesame Street.
*Kuya Bodgie is Batibot's most famous host.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
905, 657 reasons not to hang yourself tonight
[August 2007 issue of The Benildean]
According to the American College Health Association, about 44 percent of students were so depressed that it was difficult for them to function at some point in the 2006 school year. It also found that nearly 10 percent reported seriously considering suicide at least once last year.
Richard Kadison, chief of Harvard University's mental health services, said most students tackle the often overwhelming demands of student life such as developmental issues, parental and societal pressures, and economic hardships with "incredible strength and resilience." --CNN.com
Once and for all, with my rose-colored glasses on, allow me to step into the sugary cavities of optimism and pronounce that suicide is not the remedy to all your sorrows. Apart from resembling a chewed-up bologna concealed in a closed box, a suicide victim leaves behind emotional scars to his sorry relations and the stigmata of a perceived troubled psyche.
No matter how romantic happy pill-drugged poets portray suicide as (Darkling I listen; and for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death—Keats) hanging yourself over a temporal personal crisis is self-righteous and screaming bloody egotistical (pun unintended).
With the pressure of brain-bleeding deadlines, vicious, children-wolfing professors and, may I add, leering discipline officers hounding you in the hallways, examining every article of your being which might (with their fingers crossed) qualify a trip to the “hell-hole”—one, sometimes, can not evade an un-Christian contemplation on suicide (Sister Something back in grade school insisted that thoughts of suicide, even minus the execution, are already qualified as a mortal sin—non-negotiable…not even with twelve rounds of the Joyful Mysteries and a cocktail of holy water and Mompo.)
I have had my share of emo-moments (complete with a noose and kohl eyeliner). But I discovered that bawling it all off until you pass out helps tremendously—you actually wake up the next morning smiling, beaming with sunshine like a tranquilized fool in a psycho ward.
Seriously now, I came to a realization that there is so much to live for—just by reading Time Magazine from cover to cover. As opposed to your shiny middle-class life, small children continue to starve to death in Africa—with desert vultures in celebration over a smorgasbord of their sad remains. In North Korea, people live under the venomous claws of communism with families subsisting daily on porridge and where school-aged children steal coal for alcohol. In the Middle East, people live with an invisible clock humming above their doomed selves—ticking second after second—as they lie in wait in a street corner, on a bus ride home, within the four walls of a school room. Then a bomb organized by some schizoid fundamentalist goes off, murdering someone’s mother, someone’s husband, someone’s friend, someone’s child whose sad story end up on some daily broadsheet which Mr. Self Righteous—as he sits happily on his lounge chair at his sunflowers-wallpapered home situated on the map of some democratic country—ends up reading on a supposedly glorious Monday morning where hours later he gets reprimanded at work for a deadline overlooked which will lead him to later fit a noose around his three meals a day-nourished neck and suffocate the life out of him.
This when he could have instead opted for a day-off spent pigging out on ice cream and purchasing a gift of a tie for his boss—something that matches the latter’s kitchen floral wallpaper (talk about true, cruel vengeance).
On nights when you just feel like romancing a ledge, maybe you should chew on what Ernest Hemingway once quoted, “The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over”. (Sure, hotshot.)
Or perhaps, you could just shrug it off and think: Life happens.
According to the American College Health Association, about 44 percent of students were so depressed that it was difficult for them to function at some point in the 2006 school year. It also found that nearly 10 percent reported seriously considering suicide at least once last year.
Richard Kadison, chief of Harvard University's mental health services, said most students tackle the often overwhelming demands of student life such as developmental issues, parental and societal pressures, and economic hardships with "incredible strength and resilience." --CNN.com
Once and for all, with my rose-colored glasses on, allow me to step into the sugary cavities of optimism and pronounce that suicide is not the remedy to all your sorrows. Apart from resembling a chewed-up bologna concealed in a closed box, a suicide victim leaves behind emotional scars to his sorry relations and the stigmata of a perceived troubled psyche.
No matter how romantic happy pill-drugged poets portray suicide as (Darkling I listen; and for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death—Keats) hanging yourself over a temporal personal crisis is self-righteous and screaming bloody egotistical (pun unintended).
With the pressure of brain-bleeding deadlines, vicious, children-wolfing professors and, may I add, leering discipline officers hounding you in the hallways, examining every article of your being which might (with their fingers crossed) qualify a trip to the “hell-hole”—one, sometimes, can not evade an un-Christian contemplation on suicide (Sister Something back in grade school insisted that thoughts of suicide, even minus the execution, are already qualified as a mortal sin—non-negotiable…not even with twelve rounds of the Joyful Mysteries and a cocktail of holy water and Mompo.)
I have had my share of emo-moments (complete with a noose and kohl eyeliner). But I discovered that bawling it all off until you pass out helps tremendously—you actually wake up the next morning smiling, beaming with sunshine like a tranquilized fool in a psycho ward.
Seriously now, I came to a realization that there is so much to live for—just by reading Time Magazine from cover to cover. As opposed to your shiny middle-class life, small children continue to starve to death in Africa—with desert vultures in celebration over a smorgasbord of their sad remains. In North Korea, people live under the venomous claws of communism with families subsisting daily on porridge and where school-aged children steal coal for alcohol. In the Middle East, people live with an invisible clock humming above their doomed selves—ticking second after second—as they lie in wait in a street corner, on a bus ride home, within the four walls of a school room. Then a bomb organized by some schizoid fundamentalist goes off, murdering someone’s mother, someone’s husband, someone’s friend, someone’s child whose sad story end up on some daily broadsheet which Mr. Self Righteous—as he sits happily on his lounge chair at his sunflowers-wallpapered home situated on the map of some democratic country—ends up reading on a supposedly glorious Monday morning where hours later he gets reprimanded at work for a deadline overlooked which will lead him to later fit a noose around his three meals a day-nourished neck and suffocate the life out of him.
This when he could have instead opted for a day-off spent pigging out on ice cream and purchasing a gift of a tie for his boss—something that matches the latter’s kitchen floral wallpaper (talk about true, cruel vengeance).
On nights when you just feel like romancing a ledge, maybe you should chew on what Ernest Hemingway once quoted, “The real reason for not committing suicide is because you always know how swell life gets again after the hell is over”. (Sure, hotshot.)
Or perhaps, you could just shrug it off and think: Life happens.
Thursday, August 9, 2007
EDITORIAL: Juan and the beanstalk
[August 2007 issue]
In her thirteen-paged speech, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo outlined the billion peso infrastructure projects lined up for the future alongside the public-works projects that the administration has already completed. “The speech was like ‘the state of infrastructure report’,” stated Bayan Muna representative Teddy Casiño. Moreover, he remarked that the President’s address was three-fourths about infrastructure but stated nothing of definite plans to take in hand the issue of poverty and unemployment.
The President prides herself on a fiscal-development proposal supposedly attainable in 20 years. Investments in intellectual, physical, legal and business infrastructures have been created as a resolution to boost business confidence. With such reforms lined up to yield a so-called better Philippines inching alongside Asia’s economic Goliaths, the country—by 2010—can finally be regarded as nearly first world.
A preposterous pipe dream it is, if you may, setting aside optimism we tried so hard to hang on to for who-knows-how-many presidential SONAs. Economic development is an essential prerequisite for poverty reduction, but reality is, not all progress is pro-poverty. Sometimes, politicos should learn to shake off the all the highly-cerebral dialogues on political affairs and get down to the basics.
The very basic argument of bureaucracy—for instance—has a considerable effect on a country’s income growth. The government, handled by a battalion of civil servants is structurally incompetent with ineffectual agenda-setting, and policies, and a mounting corruption within the system triggered by wrong mindsets and attitudes. The country’s burdensome bureaucracy is plagued with gaps and overemphasis on policies and procedures minus the consideration for the accomplishment of intended outcomes and results.
Along with what was aforementioned, a country’s pathetic judiciary and security issues also play a fundamental role in the economic governance of a country.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one illustrates a government spiked with superficiality. Behind the gala of ornate gowns and a speech on the impossible carnival of billion-worth infrastructures is a mum society—corrupting in the venom of its own poison.
In her thirteen-paged speech, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo outlined the billion peso infrastructure projects lined up for the future alongside the public-works projects that the administration has already completed. “The speech was like ‘the state of infrastructure report’,” stated Bayan Muna representative Teddy Casiño. Moreover, he remarked that the President’s address was three-fourths about infrastructure but stated nothing of definite plans to take in hand the issue of poverty and unemployment.
The President prides herself on a fiscal-development proposal supposedly attainable in 20 years. Investments in intellectual, physical, legal and business infrastructures have been created as a resolution to boost business confidence. With such reforms lined up to yield a so-called better Philippines inching alongside Asia’s economic Goliaths, the country—by 2010—can finally be regarded as nearly first world.
A preposterous pipe dream it is, if you may, setting aside optimism we tried so hard to hang on to for who-knows-how-many presidential SONAs. Economic development is an essential prerequisite for poverty reduction, but reality is, not all progress is pro-poverty. Sometimes, politicos should learn to shake off the all the highly-cerebral dialogues on political affairs and get down to the basics.
The very basic argument of bureaucracy—for instance—has a considerable effect on a country’s income growth. The government, handled by a battalion of civil servants is structurally incompetent with ineffectual agenda-setting, and policies, and a mounting corruption within the system triggered by wrong mindsets and attitudes. The country’s burdensome bureaucracy is plagued with gaps and overemphasis on policies and procedures minus the consideration for the accomplishment of intended outcomes and results.
Along with what was aforementioned, a country’s pathetic judiciary and security issues also play a fundamental role in the economic governance of a country.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one illustrates a government spiked with superficiality. Behind the gala of ornate gowns and a speech on the impossible carnival of billion-worth infrastructures is a mum society—corrupting in the venom of its own poison.
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Election 2007 Analysis
The Filipinos are wiser on this year's elections
June 2007 issue, The Benildean
Joseph Estrada’s victory in the 1998 Presidential race was as unfortunate as the mounting superficiality of Filipinos. With experience and intellect superseding the status quo of popularity and good looks, Philippine box office superstars were more likely to bag a seat in the government to the embarrassment of the already corruption-despoiled Philippines.
Of course there were the page-oners sitting pretty in the senate—the hotshots who once in their life had feigned infirmities and posed as heroes to the delight of film aficionados. As if the limelight of being a superstar is not enough, they decided on a spot in politics and once again, their devotees’ unwavering admiration never failed them.
It’s a hopeless argument, you reckon. But in the recent senatorial and congressional race, Filipinos appeared to have woken up to the stink smell of coffee and acted intelligently through their votes. Cesar Montano, an obvious pawn of the administration, failed to use his pizzazz to bag a role in the senate. The same goes for boxing big cheese Manny Pacquiao whose obvious lack of brain power caused him a knock out from the politically-experienced Darlene A. Custodio.
Call it a revolution in a form of a vote. The Filipinos have had enough of tongue in cheek promises and popularity contests in the bright lights of politics. This year, the senatorial/congressional election is a good sign that a longed-for change is now visible in our horizon.
June 2007 issue, The Benildean
Joseph Estrada’s victory in the 1998 Presidential race was as unfortunate as the mounting superficiality of Filipinos. With experience and intellect superseding the status quo of popularity and good looks, Philippine box office superstars were more likely to bag a seat in the government to the embarrassment of the already corruption-despoiled Philippines.
Of course there were the page-oners sitting pretty in the senate—the hotshots who once in their life had feigned infirmities and posed as heroes to the delight of film aficionados. As if the limelight of being a superstar is not enough, they decided on a spot in politics and once again, their devotees’ unwavering admiration never failed them.
It’s a hopeless argument, you reckon. But in the recent senatorial and congressional race, Filipinos appeared to have woken up to the stink smell of coffee and acted intelligently through their votes. Cesar Montano, an obvious pawn of the administration, failed to use his pizzazz to bag a role in the senate. The same goes for boxing big cheese Manny Pacquiao whose obvious lack of brain power caused him a knock out from the politically-experienced Darlene A. Custodio.
Call it a revolution in a form of a vote. The Filipinos have had enough of tongue in cheek promises and popularity contests in the bright lights of politics. This year, the senatorial/congressional election is a good sign that a longed-for change is now visible in our horizon.
Friday, May 25, 2007
Reality stings, brother
[Published in the June 2007 issue of The Benildean]
The universe has enough troubles.
And the Pinoy Big Brother show insists on shoving down throats the wretched hang-ups, and love sorrows of twelve stereotypes sifted out from tens and thousands of other stereotypes. Not to mention bombarding prime time with song and dance numbers of celebrities-formerly-known-as-Big-Brother-housemates, causing its viewers’ brains to bleed out of their ears. Wow, and I thought government advertisements are total waste of precious air time.
The Big Brother show, real-life soap, invented by Dutchman John De Mol, was first aired in the Netherlands in the year 1999. A prime time hit in 70 countries, the show’s name was derived from George Orwell's 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which an omnipresent character, Big Brother, is the deific leader of the dystopian Oceania in year 1984.
Residing in a communal house, the twelve ‘housemates’, as they are appropriately referred to, live under a 24 hour surveillance. Speaking in a psychological perspective, the show is designed to observe an individual’s behavior in a circumstance which involves a close confinement in the company of eleven other strangers of various personal histories.
The Pinoy Big Brother show or PBB, first aired in December 10, 2005, has had a couple of seasons and two editions namely The Pinoy Big Brother: Celebrity Edition and Pinoy Big Brother: Teen Edition, respectively. Since 2005, ABS-CBN, through the PBB show, has amused and entertained the gossip-hungry, controversy-mongering boob tube fans with the PBB’s censorship issues and casting allegations. And yes, PBB with ABS-CBN lurking behind the walls, has launched the television, music and movie careers of PBB’s former housemates. Talk about having your cake and gorging it too.
When the PBB Teen Edition was first launched, I had this conversation with a friend who explained that ABS-CBN used the show for a fast go-through of its possible teen celebrities. “It’s the Star Circle Quest substitute. Didn’t you notice that all the kids who got in are cute?” Fair enough, I examined each and every of Big Brother’s newest hostages and none qualified as unattractive to me. There were the usual Amerasian kind, with hazel eyes and sallow complexion, reminiscent of hundreds of Filipino television idols through the years of pathetic Philippine show business history who sing and dance at noon time variety shows and later on get thrown in a love team for a blockbuster sappy movie. Sure enough, several months after Kim Chiu was declared the PBB Teen Edition’s Big Winner, her arse was signed up for a television career and is now happily pushing hamburgers and jeans along with ten other products.
But what I find especially miserable about the whole PBB conundrum is not just its housemates later pretending they could belt a song on an ABS-CBN variety show Sunday afternoons. It is also the real-life relationships jeopardized because of romantic relationships formed while confined inside the Big Brother house—relationships developed out of the desperation brought by the prolonged absence of their real-life romances.
Of course, I’m counting in episodes with controversial content, sexual in nature and controversies in nearly every of its godforsaken episode. Whatever happened to really exploiting the human nature which, by the way, is what really the Big Brother show is created for?
Kapamilya. Sure.
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