AT THE STOA

I picked up a new book again after nearly a year of not reading. I was battling with depression and unproductivity for nearly a whole year, and got married. "Why did I put those two things together?", as Bechdel's mother would also ask. Since it is Bechdel that I just picked up, and like I did with her Fun Home , I wanted to write and weave everything going on in my life in one dizzying, coherent narrative. I will fail, since, one, I am not Bechdel, and two, I haven't written anything remotely substantial for the past six months. I should go see my therapist. At least I have been going out for walks and errands for the past week. I remember a young lady in the jeepney I rode to town one day, whose hair was so straight and black it might have come from a rebond commercial, strands falling behind and on top of her ears. Her face shield was on her forehead, one of those people whom my nephew would look at very violently for not following face shield protocols, and her fi

I remember, one lifetime ago, when I handled one semester of ludology (or game studies - "the study of games, the act of playing them, and the players and cultures surrounding them") in a Manila university. It was a team-taught course, and I handled the philosophy part of it - the aesthetics of games, the question of embodiment in gaming - but not its ethics, to my regret. (Maybe that's what spawned this post.) Now, in this lifetime, I can - abashedly, however - call myself a gamer. Of just one particular game and server. I did play some other console games and other MMORPGs, but not as investedly as I do in this one. This month's event in this server is what's called Conqueror's Path, and my school - MP - holds the lead by 3 to null, mostly because we have more players in MP (~4 parties) than in SG (~2 parties), the rival school. (There's supposed to be three schools, but the other one - Phoenix - is a deserted wasteland of cow skulls and tumbleweeds.) Af

 So there's actually a long backstory to this one.  The penultimate conversation starter to this piece was when I was working on a file which had, among other things, a mother concerned for her son, who, at the age of 25, was still looking for his way and place in the world. I told my best friend about some of the file, whom I was at the cafe working with, and used the word "groundless," as in not belonging anywhere. My best friend and I - we've been friends for more'n two decades - had had our share of groundlessness. So we speculated about this groundlessness, and why it was there. We recognize our values stemming from our parents and our parents' generation, where work was defined as something more solid and tangible - in terms of outputs, regimented office hours, fixed salaries, uniforms, tenure. That's why we - in the Filipino household context, at least - still think of "proper" jobs as those belonging to doctors, nurses, engineers, policem