AT THE STOA

The TV program "The Hero" asks if you can volunteer your friends with a certain fear to go on the show while the world watches them make asses of themselves getting over their fears.  Or presumably die trying while successfully having made asses of themselves getting over their fears.  Or just opt for death rather than face their fears, national TV be damned.  One, if you were a true friend, you wouldn't do that, two, if you were a true friend, you really, really, wouldn't do that.  Come on.  There is no way to justify that to the friend you just volunteered to go on TV.  "I'm doing this for your sake, that fear is unhealthy.  Maybe the pressure of being watched by two million people will cure you.  You know I care.  I care a lot" goes against all the rules of decency, friendship, and logic.  The same could be said of any other reality show, which has none of those rules, or any rule whatsoever. My friends, because they are my friend...

When we were younger my sister and I played on this empty lot in front of our house.  Because this is the Philippines, or at least Baguio, "empty lot" translates to an unpaved space less than forty square feet.  You wouldn't call it a "playground," because only people who can afford three pairs of shoes for their children do that, and certainly would not allow their children near that lot.  Even when I was in a private grade school I rarely refer to my school's playground as "playground" - I and my classmates just manage to see each other after dismissal there without problematizing what it's called, and then proceed to systematically destroy our uniforms with the games we play. That empty lot held a lot of promise, especially for children, who will always think dirt is the most awesome thing there is.  I mean, it had everything: the aforementioned awesome dirt, patches of grass in which coins and small things always land and disappear, a vie...

If a day could be called by how much its events resemble the feeling in particular stories, today would be a David Sedaris book.   I spent the entire morning (and a chunk of the afternoon) in bed (or more precisely, on two large square futons amid endlessly reproducing pillows), alternating between reading his book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim  and sleeping.  It's one of those days I get, when even with a full night's sleep of seven or eight hours, I still while away the entire day sleeping.  I didn't have to go to class until 5:30 in the afternoon, so, like anybody who promised to have the most productive day ever, I slept, and produced sweat.  The day passed me by. I had time enough before 5:30 to go to the lecture room when I noticed an LBC package on my table.  It was from my former student, who is now an author of what appears to be a children's book based on his blog .  It wasn't a children's book. It was a good one, though, ir...

         Wittgenstein impressively lays the groundwork for understanding philosophy as grammatical investigation in  Philosophical Investigations [1], by reorienting our understanding of language and thought in terms of language-games and grammar.  Grammar, in Wittgenstein’s sense, inform language-games, which are shared forms of life the rules for which function more like signposts (§199) rather than precepts manifesting a metaphysical, ideal, or neural reality with which our language and thought accords.  This formulation of language-games and grammar, i.e., as both given and shared, problematize the grounds of philosophical disciplines, particularly epistemology and philosophy of language. In so doing, he problematizes one of the dualities which held sway within philosophy for a long time: the ontological duality of the physical and the mental.  This duality corresponds to a further dualism, that of the inner and the outer of the men...

is buying stuff (which, it may be added, we don't need, with money which, it might further be added, we don't really have).  So here is what Pasco bought a couple of days ago: A Wild Beckenbauer suddenly appears!    And here is what I  bought: Snorlax used Sleep! I still maintain that I have the better purchase: I have Snorlax.

The past seventeen months held my first three terms (or four, including summer) in postgraduate school.  Since it's school, it's full of people talking, and writing, and of talking about writing, and writing about talking, or any other permutation involving those two pedagogical things.  Since it's  postgraduate  school, the talking and the writing happen in the land marked "Here be Dragons," ruled by B minuses with the strength of ten men and the dreaded entities called deadlines. I assume that learning happens by osmosis amid these processes and entities. I didn't have time to write about starting school again, and I still don't have time to properly digest my feelings about moving to Manila.  (I know that my university is in Quezon City, okay, but for Baguio folks the entirety of QC, Marikina, Pasig, Mandaluyong, San Juan, Caloocan, Navotas, Makati, every other city within a ten-mile radius of all these places and even Metro Manila is for all intents ...

The semestral break finally kicked in.  Before we allow ourselves to be reminded of the amount of our work left undone, or of papers that will very nearly evolve into a sentient mountain, we made time to waste as happily as we could. We spent hours looking at stuff we can't afford, as well as stuff that we can afford but did not buy for being too fluffy, big, useless (or all of the above).   Except for two things.  Well, it was more like seven hundred and twenty-four things, but we can just call them two things.  The first one is a happy golden yellow backpack the color of fresh egg yolk. It felt like a warm hug to be able to buy it, because this is the first backpack that I bought for myself. The bag I had in primary school was a red and gray hand-me-down from a cousin, and was subsequently and continuously impregnated with seven hundred and twenty-four textbooks and notebooks.  That bag lived for five years until I went to college, with a collect...

There's a flight of stairs that connects Marikina to Ateneo de Manila.  I usually pass through there when I go to school, as I did today.  On approximately the twentieth step I found a big snail, the kind with a twirled shell, slimefully dragging itself and its load of a house across the ground.  I looked at it for a while, then went ahead. Not more than five seconds later I heard a fairly loud crunch, and saw a high school student walking up the stairs, who passed me indifferently and continued on.  The snail was dead. I'm not going to write about a mystical connection with the snail through metaphorizing the stairs or the slaughtering adolescent.  Only that last night as I struggled to sleep I kept thinking how different I am in this place, and how different this place is, and I no longer know how to identify differences any more than I can gauge how far stars are.  

I'm not used to experiencing storms like this, when I was still up North. When my sister and I were children growing up, I remember storms being blackouts, candles, and the oddly-timed desire to read books with very small print and no pictures, just when classes and homework were suspended.  Sometimes the storms were very angry affairs, and our ceiling, being very low, amplified the raging sound from outside.  Since our barangay was nestled in between the hills that make Baguio a very hilly place indeed, the wind tracing and racing through the contours of hillsides and mountains made sounds like a whistle on steroids.  Sometimes, though, they're almost peaceful, the kind of rain that you can ignore, not knowing that Kennon road is slowly going to pieces as usual, just hearing afterward of the many landslides which queued all the way from the summer that finally went "go!", one after another.  That's usually how storms in Baguio are - landslides leaving gashes...

At the right is a picture of what is increasingly becoming my work space. It's the bedroom floor. What is more significant than the answer to the question, "don't you have tables at home?" is why I let my papers due this month balloon to three term papers and two - no, wait, three - shorter papers. Presently I am working on a beginning (and beginner's) conceptual comparative between Derrida and Nishida.  I said that to substantiate the first sentence, and in case you were wondering whether I put that book with the exotic-looking cover in there on purpose. Several things spring to mind, now.  Apart from my Methods of Research professor echoing, first, advice in my head against the evils of binge writing (which I should have paid attention to), and second,  warning (which I also should have paid attention to) about the tendency of putting priorities in order to avoid the first priority becoming first priorit ies,  because it accumulates into the place of immac...

The table next to ours sits a woman and a child of perhaps seven. They did not talk much, as the lady was somewhat engrossed with her face. She kept taking her phone out of what looks to be like a designer bag, the kind of phone with the front camera that one can coddle one's systemic vanity with.  Once in a while she would bring out a cosmetic artifice, once a compact, then a lipstick. All this time she turns the camera phone on and off, adjusting her dyed-blond hair this way and that. Only once did I hear the child speak, saying "there's a fly on your food," waving his tiny hands over the plate. She did not appear to notice.

Sabi nga ni pareng Murakami, ang sofa ay hindi lamang sofa. Marami kang masasabi tungkol sa tao base sa sofa niya; kahit wag mong seryosohin ang kanyang pananamit, pagkain na kinahihiligan, o relihiyon, kailangan mong seryosohin ang kanyang sofa. Ang upuan ko sa opisina ay tuwid, makintab, itim, at lubusang hindi pagbibigyan ang scoliosis ng kahit sinuman. Kahit na ito'y malambot, ito'y matigas; pinapaalala sa akin na kailangan kong magtrabaho, magbasa, yumuko sa mga papel at kung anuman ang kailangang tunawin ng aking sistema bago magklase.       Kaya lagi akong nangangapitbahay para matulog. Kinukuha ko ang unan na iyan at nakikitulog sa cubicle ng may cubicle, dahil, ayon nga sa unan, kailangan kong hanapin ang kasiyahan ko't pumunta doon maya't maya. Samantala, ang upuan ko sa bahay ay malambot, puno ng bilog-bilog, at tiyak na pasasayahin ang likod, puwit, tiyan, at kaluluwa ng sinumang maupo. Isa itong nilalang ng mahabaging diyos, isang salungdamdam...

Start with ginger beer, go through ridiculously small doughnuts, pass through a memorial park, end with coffee and an extremely orgasmic sunset in a coffee shop up in Baguio. A family lunch capped off these three weekends, and all I can do is describe them in pictures, having no words for how it is like to leave my hometown and family again; having no words for how I am supposed to recalibrate my existential compass after life has done its work - happen. We bought two when my sister went down to Manila for a while, and they made me burp a lot. We went to the Loyola Memorial Cemetery one afternoon one day, and all I can take pictures of were dead plants among living ones, and a rusty chain on an equally rusted post, its yellow and black stripes peeling off the metal.   And one day we bought what are called "baby doughnuts" from Eastwood, where the resident band proved to us that some people still appreciate good, old, music. Without my...

Only Murakami gives me this feeling of having turned my days into a narrative resembling a hiccuping, smooth staccato.  Apparently, he also makes me write like a complete twat. I feel like my days are constructed in simple sentences that somehow, in a design ineffable, make the storyline plod along.  You see. A complete twat. What happened was this. I stumbled quite inadvertently onto an e-book reader application complete with a severely long list of authors whose works were themselves available for free download.  So I got a dubious one of Wilde's entitled  Sh*t My Dad (Never) Says,  several of Murakami's works, and the entire lot of Pratchett's.   (I have a strange, inarticulatable feeling about this.  On the one hand, having completed the Discworld, his earlier, and  later novels in the form of a full-blooded, ink-and-paper library is severely satisfying.  Having a virtual copy of the same didn't add anything resembling good to the ...

Adding to the ten billion other posts on summer ever recorded, described, painted, and posted anywhere - summer is, at least in the corner of the universe I call my own - travelling home to Baguio and going on a hike, assured that you will be legitimately going on a nature-embracing frolic and coming back out of it a dirtier, albeit a better, man - - and finding beautiful tugs of war between biology, architecture and gravity. While in Baguio, summer is also going back to the coffee shops tucked here and there, happily charging midway between exorbitant and acceptable prices for food and drink (which no amount of editing in Picasa will render any more scrumptuous) - - blueberry pancakes that are really blue, and chrysanthemum tea served in paraphernalia so pretty-looking it made me forget to wonder why I ordered tea made of drowned flowers. Summer is also the time of birthdays - - my mother's 72nd, wi...