what's so great, you ask?
finally me and the missus got to watch the cinemalaya film festival on its last day last Saturday. watched Endo (JD Castro) and Pisay (Aureus Solito) and was pleasantly surprised by how good they were. especially Pisay. I always knew Aureus Solito was a good visual storyteller. i was just afraid the film would be like Gawad Kalinga's films: sincere and honest, but well, propaganda. it was nice to really see that the film could be appreciated even by non-Pisay people.
so what's so great the last few days? it feels really good that finally i'm writing in my blog again. this is actually my blog's third year, but you'd never guess with the thinness of the posts. i look back and see that there have been pockets, months on end when i wouldn't post anything. i thought then that i wouldn't mind, but now i see that i sort of wonder whatever happened to me during those gaps. what was i thinking? how did i see myself, or the people around me? i can never really know for sure now.
i have lots of storylines in my head at any given time than i care to admit. like everytime i cross the busy domestic airport road in front of the office, my mind always goes into overdrive, seizing all those movie scenes i've seen where people get run over by cars. "Meet Joe Black" is a particular reference point: i guess i have work cut out for me to make myself as handsome as Brad Pitt in the event that some asshole runs me over. and oh yes, i can be gothic and vain at the same time.
in a few months i'll be thiry years old. three decades, man, three fucking decades. when i was ten i thought thirty year olds were ancient. now, the next person who'd say thirty is "advanced" is a candidate for castration-by-jeff.
take stock, take stock. count your blessings. live your life well and without malice. never give up, never give in. love like you've never been hurt before. la vita y bella rather than c'est la vie.
cliches, man, cliches. good at rhymes, bite-size chunks of wisdom, popular wisdom. easy to spew out, easy to chew on. for the madly in love, cliches explain everything. for the grief-stricken, cliches can save their sanity. but if the medium is the message, cliches and love songs tell us that the message can still be valid, given the right circumstances.
so i have learned never to take cliches for granted.
what else? ahhh...i don't like to travel much now. i'd much rather just stay home and play with the kids. or play Zuma. or wait for evening prayer time to come. for the rains to come. nothing much, nothing so significant. one time, me and the wifey just went to bayside and ate some fishballs till the sun set. total budget was around 50 bucks. but it was a blast!
i realize my life has been one hard life. getting married early and raising a family when i myself could help a little more raising, hehe. moving from one place to another, one job to another. lettign go of several dreams along the way, but finding out worthier new dreams to hang on to along the way. losing some friends, relatives, mentors.
i also realize i've had an amazingly lucky life. being at the right place and time to get scholarships, and later on, jobs. having absolutely loyal and loving friends and family. being blessed with the most beautiful kids one could ever wish for (okay maybe, a little less kulit would be useful, but where's the fun in that? hehe). finding a truly good person to be my wife.
even in times when i messed up, somehow, out of luck or sheer stubbornness, i've always been able to recover. "to live only by grace" can only half-explain it!
what's so great you ask? i am going to tell you and you listen well: what's great, my friend, is that after all, we can still become better persons, despite even ourselves.
si ate ay may syotang puti
somebody ought to study the emerging phenomenon of mass intermarriage between pinays and caucasians.
the internet is such a wild place. but given that internet cafes and sites don't have any way to monitor these web-based meeting places, there is a fairly high chance of someone somewhere getting sucked into some sort of exploitative situations.
both sides try to be as nice as possible. there may even be a good percentage of people meeting truly nice acquaintances. but for every good chance, how many more do so for easy pleasure, or easy bucks?
it is true that when people fall in love, it distinguishes neither age, nor creed, nor in this phenomenon, race. but why is it that many caucasian men love asian women in ways that confuse even asian men?
for their exoticism. women in the orient are viewed as pre-moral, that is, they freely commit of themselves to their men without pre-conceived notions of morality. in other words, without guilt, and without hassles. this is an assumption that comes from the east having produced such cultural icons as the kamasutra, and the geisha. add to this the fact that the west's economic superiority also means that the men almost always can assume the role of "breadwinner/provider" to the women's family with relative "ease."
what results is a quick relationship whose roots, reasons and future can be labyrinthine. multiplied by sheer number, the potential disaster of this social minefield can indeed have a huge impact on our society.
what impacts? of course, there's human trafficking. there's HIV/AIDS. there's multiple marriages and subsequent divorces and its impact on the kids. there's social security. i imagine it can almost turn into the wholescale pimping of provincial barrio lasses! no wonder many people in Mindanao talk about the sudden proliferation of internet cafes as if these were rapidly becoming centers for prostitution.
to be fair, i know of many marriages between caucasian men and piany women which are stronger than the rest of ours. it's not really a matter of race, but of sincerity. if people are really in love, they have as much right as others to do whatever they please. but again, at what social cost?
i just remembered
it's been two years since my tita suddenly died of aneurysm. the whole family went to the hometown for a little shared meal.
among many deaths we have seen in the family, that death shocked the family the most because tita didn't look ill at all, and from the time she collapsed, it took just a couple of days till she was gone. her last words to her husband were "ano ba 'yun? ang sakit naman!" she was clutching her head in total agony, as her jaws were slowly starting to lock. she went unconscious and straight into coma. the aneurysm in the brain was so massive the doctors were totally helpless, saying no operation could save her. my tita's family was relatively well-off, but no money in the world could help. it was a feeling of utter helplessness.
she never regained consciousness. that was it. no dramatic farewells like those in the movies. nothing. it was so sudden it seemed like she was abducted. "like a thief in the night."
two years hence, it was interesting to look at the family she left behind. tito has concentrated on the family business because he has five kids to look after, two who are already in college. i must say they're doing very well, keeping the memory of my tita alive, and at the same time moving on with their lives.
i know deep down in their hearts, there is a place that misses someone. we feel it too. we are a big family, but very close to each other despite the size and distance to where we all live.
it's always an ambiguous feeling going back to my hometown in Pampanga. among the third-generation kids in the family, it's me who most vividly remembers how this place looked like before the pinatubo lahar engulfed the town. that memory of lush ricefields and rich fishponds of my grade school years always contrasts with the present powdery landscape. it's no longer a desert as it once looked. the rainy day floods have started to become less and less severe as each rainy season passed. some fishponds have started coming back. still, the flowing creek at the back of the house hasn't flowed in 10 years. it's now murky green. everywhere you look, there is still plenty of evidence that the devastation hasn't gone yet, or maybe, it will never go away.
if this was a story, the town's decaying beauty can find the perfect objective corelative in several people i know personally who have either left the town, have died, or are currently in the throes of terrible illness. whether choosing to stay here despite the hardships, or living in our loving memories and looking at us from above, or giving as a heartwarming, glowing smile even if one arm has drooped, they're all still here. for laughter and a good meal.
permanence is an illusion. beauty, fleeting. but love lasts as long as we fight to keep it alive.
so what now?
i wish i could write again in the same vein that i did before. but now that im staring at the monitor, it's a hard labor.
i wish words would come, but words just don't.
ah, all i have is hope. hope that everything isn't in vain. the last three months have been really crazy.
