goo goo g'joob!

mahigit dalawang taon na. nasan si jonas???

reposting from BBC world service

honey, please take out the trash

(or my attempt at being trivial. because i'm thinking maybe truth, peace and love may really emanate from the trivial and we're just too hoighty-toighty to admit it)

i need new shoes. been walking around manila for days on end these past few weeks for a project and my (free) flood-resistant croc impostors are killing my feet. i miss my old ratty sneakers. they were so worn out and comfy i could even sleep in them should i pass out on the couch. problem was that one rainy day, water leaked into the right shoe through a hole beneath the sole which i had previously not known of. after that, i still used my beloved shoes despite the damage. however, because of this country's very unpredictable weather, i ended up walking through trinoma one day loudly squishing yucky water onto shop floors. not good. for posterity's sake, i wanted to keep the pair but decided to give it away after ondoy. i hope somebody finds comfort in it on a sunny day despite that little catch. goodbye comfy sneakers, you served me well. i sure hope i find a good replacement for you one of these days.

(photo by Sussanah Conway from Bath, UK)

Once More the Minister 2

It seems the real triumph of our age has been our ongoing movement
Away from harm – its many sources more than its pain; from dark alleys –
Its stealth more than its assassins; from descent – the anticipation of demise
More than the demise. Nature has been quick to compensate, now
Sends the wind to deliver its judgement. We now die without
Moving from our beds. The only remaining torture: our hearts
And our quiet ways of remembering. These we will always endure.
Notice, in an evening ripened by cold weather, when the clouds
Have moved elsewhere, and the sky, baring all of its ammunition,
Dazzling and infinite, has shot us down with unbearable longing,
Those of us with distance between our many loves
Cannot do anything as delicate as bend.

-E.J. Galang

this is a short photo story i did during the 5th PCP professional photojournalism workshop in august 2009. the posting is way long overdue.

i got word from kanawan that ate nerissa passed away two weeks ago. kuya ed is now left to raise five little children on his own. i'm taking the news very badly because i wonder if publishing this story earlier would have changed some things.

this is a grim reminder not to be self-indulgent as a storyteller. as a witness, i realize i have the moral obligation to tell some stories to as many people possible, the soonest time possible.

consistently inconsistent

nature vs. nurture, fatalism vs. determinism, temperament vs. behavior. which of these reign supreme in the daily grind of being?

i always believed that every child born into this world had a pre-set mixture of temperaments. people grew up in the same environment as part of the same family and turn out to be different from each other. in fact, you even notice this with babies, way before they are educated and influenced by other people. some babies are very cheerful and some are very quiet or serious or mischievous or shy.

as a person grows older, he gains the capacity to think for himself and choose whom he will be. in choosing, he either accepts what he is used to being or change the things he wants to be different about himself. i wonder: how much of me stays true to my natural temperament and how much of me is my own self-engineering? which is predominant now, the me i was born into or the me i want to become? should there even be a struggle for self-improvement (based on personal standards) or is it unnecessary and arduous and lonely and futile?

i try keep an open mind and sometimes, just for kicks, i look into divination and astrology just to see how they coincide with my personality as i perceive it. it is interesting to note that among the many quizes and numerology calculations i've been taking, the results consistently show major inconsistencies.

i link my numerology life path reading and my maya-aztec reading as they sum up all the others i've encountered. as you see, these are quite contradictory descriptions.

if i summarize these cosmic mumbo-jumbo and my own take on myself, i can see dichotomies that exist in my personality (and yes, i did a table HAHA):

the right side of the table more aptly describes me as a kid. i remember that i was a very very motivated and focused as a student. study time is study time, tv time is tv time and i rarely watched tv on weekdays. up to early high school, if i wanted to perfect an exam, i would. i would get 100/100 on quarterly tests, sometimes 99/100 when i am a bit careless with my spelling. i was never the problem child, never got called to the principal's office except for when my brother paul did something unthinkable for the nth time. when paul was in grade 2, the principal called me because he pushed a classmate against a wall and the poor kid got knocked up pretty badly into a protruding head of a nail. you could imagine my horror upon seeing blood all on the kid's head and on my brother's shirt as well... but i digress. the point is, i was a very sensible child with up to par abilities and generally good intentions.

i don't exactly know what happened but during high school i began to relax. i must have figured out i was missing out on a lot of things so i tried to rebel from myself a little. i liked it. i no longer felt the need to follow my schedules. i gave in to my whims and compulsions. in college, i became the slacker underachiever B student who spent too much time at the orgroom tambayan. I was one whom friends could call up in the middle of the night to eat dimusm and siopao at red panda, watch the last full show at sta. lucia (no gateway yet) or hang out at shell select with. life was great!

however, all of my previous self was not lost. my friends complained that i knew all things about them but they knew nothing of my "secrets". up to now, they still complain. then, i did not see the need to express myself especially if no one asked. i am not one to impose myself on others. my world was written in a journal with a padlock! now it's slightly different. i feel an incessant need to create, to express not so much the details of my daily existence (oh hell, no. especially not with strangers and mere acquiantances) but the underlying patterns of human behavior and social, moral, emotional, intellectual structural gridlocks that i am able to observe and slightly make sense of, just to get them off my chest. sometimes, a stupid line from a song shoots a ray of sunlight into my addled brain and i'd want to jump, shout out and share the nonsense because at that time i'd just feel like doing so. sometimes i do, sometimes my old self takes over and i don't.

there's not a clean break between my right-table self and my left-table self. and i am getting a bit stressed about the contradictions. which do i choose?

i choose the right side and i feel i've slipped back to where i am no longer supposed to be. i choose the left side and i do so at productivity's cost.

being more of my previous self is okay. it's all right -- predictable, nice, steady. but i can never go back. it won't work. being more of my "life path" self is crazy. when i'm happy, i'm really happy and when i'm in the dumps, it's really really mucky down there. extreme moods take me and when they do, i am at their mercy. there's so much internal work and pep-talking to do in order to function well in society.

should i compromise and strike out a balance? if i do would that mean i'm not really being my true self? or does being my true self simply mean being at ease with the mixture of my nature and my self-engineering and realizing that it's fultile to adamantly cling to just either. how do i reconcile these things??? are they even reconcile-able? should being true to oneself even be the question? how important is the self?

wow. i began to write these things looking forward to some kind of conclusion. but it seems that's hard to come by. i give up... for now. o dear faithful readers (yes, the three of you) any thoughts? text me, email me, pick me up for 3 rounds of beer. it doesn't matter.

mental exercises of the sleepless kind: normalcy

more than a week after the great flood, things are receding into their proper places. after one full tiring week of volunteer relief work, i am again in front of the laptop trying to do some paperwork due this week. in the background i hear my flatmate taking a shower, getting ready for a usual working day. my neighbor is cooking breakfast. normal?

what is normal? normal is a regular job, picket fence, rosy perfect skin, iced tea, pretty dresses and a sunny day. it is three kids, maybe four, a doting husband, a two-storey house in a middle-class subdivision. it's an xuv, a tv room, a musical instrument, a hamper half-full of dirty laundry, a dog, a lawn and a backyard. okay, so that's late 30's normal. in your 20's, normal is a clean space, gainful employment, nights out with friends at posh restaurants, movies, out-of-town triple or quadruple dating, photos at facebook showing how happy you are with your significant other--cheek to cheek, all smiles...normal.

when i was younger, i thought i was normal and i didn't like it. i wished i were more un-normal. i think i wished on the right star. now i wonder if there were a star to unmake previous wishes. i think i finally need nice, predictable, steady and quiet. i promise, i won't get restless...you think?

nah, i take it back. who am i kidding? it won't work. not when right this very moment you know there is a ten-wheeler relief truck bound for tuguegarao. not when you know thousands of families by the pasig river can't rebuild their ravaged houses and are in danger of being relocated to sub-standard resettlement sites against their will. not when there is still no promising candidate for the presidential elections. and then you're back on the streets choosing that over a simple nine-to-five and nice skin.

no amount of pining for normal will un-un-normalize things.