AT THE STOA

I decided to continue watching Hyouka after a grueling week of doing a departmental report that will neither get me paid nor mean much.  The protagonist, Oreki Houtarou, is a clever high-schooler who seems to always get entangled in mysteries, which only he can solve, since he is good at observation, deduction, and seeing obtuse connections.  It's a tribute to mystery writers like Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, who the anime mentions often.  He ends up attributing his success to luck, after which he reverts to his default mode, which is one of detachment, conserving energy, and cynical yet proper responses to everything. Furthermore, however, it also turns out to be quite a deep exploration of how those who like the protagonist are both skilled and passionless, generate a complex relation with those with less competence but with more drive.  For one, those who are skilled but attribute their achievements to luck, and spend their lives with the possibili...

For the topic “Pain from Significant Loss,” Gabay Inspirational Forum on Pain, 30 October 2015, Ateneo de Manila University A couple of months ago, a friend of mine asked why people are fundamentally riddled with contradiction, especially in wanting things.  “Why is it that we want the things that will hurt us the most?” she asked.  For instance, she greatly wanted to have someone to love, specifically a child of her own, but having one ultimately entails having one to love and having that beloved child grow up only to be separated from her when fully mature.  Raising a child, after all, is raising him or her to be independent, meaning that you are raising a person to become his or her own person in time.   She presented another example: another friend of ours wanted a stable job which coincides with his passion in life, but having one would ultimately entail him to work his butt off, to completely excel in some projects, to completely fail in some, and maybe to ...

Image courtesy of crimespreemag.com I still haven't read the Batman end of Endgame , but I'll say this with the confidence of a planet in a field of dandelions: though it follows the Night of Owls,   Death of the Family , Zero Year et.al.,  The Joker: Endgame  stands out by a mile in the way Snyder's storytelling has, to my eyes, grown.  Snyder and his team has injected more depth in The Joker's character in an amazingly short amount of time and pages, given that the compilation is riddled with side stories apart from the event itself.  It collects Batman #35-40, Arkham Manor: Endgame #1, Batgirl: Endgame #1, Batman Annual #3, Detective Comics: Endgame #1 and Gotham Academy: Endgame #1. Spoilers ahead, somewhat. This time brought out as the Pale Man who suspiciously appears in all of Gotham's historical tragedies, The Joker has upped his abnormality by having had access to Dionesium sometime after the events of Death of the Family .   Because...

The soul to the body is like the captain to a ship: it commandeers the ship.  It is the master of the ship.  It sinks with the ship, after making sure the women and children are safe. Freedom is like a double-edged sword: it  is at once fundamental to human nature and terrible.  It kills enemies when wielded with a sure hand; and makes a bloody good mantelpiece. Words are like pictures to reality.  They represent what is real.  Most of them are tasteless, and some are downright baffling.  This does not prevent them from selling for US$ 44 million. The mind is like a computer.  It is a computing engine, like any Turing Machine.  It can compute your taxes, while managing to purchase every item on the goddamned grocery list. The mind is like an iceberg.  Its unconscious is largely submerged underwater, with only a minimal one-seventh visible.  It is cold, and sometimes striped.  The rarest ones are supposedly flipped and b...

When I was younger and therefore more pretentious, I used to write poems about the sea a lot.  In all probability I may have abused the metaphoricity of all sea-related things - lighthouses, boats, sailors, waves, albatrosses - all standing for one emotional crisis or another. Most of the time I would, like a teenager who doesn't know his Shakespeare (I still don't), fill a card with an obtuse poem about a lone sailor on the sea with stars and whatnot only to guide his way, filled with love and longing for something he knows he cannot have, or even successfully navigate (since the sailor is an idiot).  And most of the time I would get a baffled response along the lines of "If the sea represents me, and the sailor is you... Why is the sailor male?" or something like that.  Which of course begs a lot of questions, the first one being "why use the sea-sailor when mountain-hiker or toaster-bread would just be as inefficient?" There's something about the se...

Time has no need to be merciful, and at any rate, all it can do is pass. Its passing is felt in pauses: when I realize I have been on 9gag for the better parts of three days, when I could - and should have been - doing anything else.  While wasting it, it remains wasted to us, and to those priorities that remain unchecked in our tick boxes; and having wasted it we pause to reflect on its having passed.  Its passing is felt in pauses, pauses that do not pause the passing of time, but pauses us in the wasting of it.  In our pausing we become more aware of how time passes: time can do nothing but pass, no matter how we pause. Its passing is felt in losses: I remember a friend whose mother died a few years ago.  In the death of anyone we know, time looms large; it is a reminder that does not need a reminder - which does not need any toll - for it is that which makes presence, and therefore, absence.  Death does not stop time for those still in it; death only sto...

contained my family observing Lent, my nephew's birthday, my mother's birthday, and my school break all in one.  Pasco, me and our friend from the office rode up to San Fernando, La Union with my brother-in-law, thus saving fare money.  (That didn't stop us - or at least me - from going back down to Marikina with nearly empty pockets, though.) We went to Asin hot springs near Baguio the next day, the highlight of which was me and my sister screaming like ninnies on a hanging bridge (damn these hanging bridges).  All of them - my mother, my brother-in-law, my nephew, my niece, my mother, my office friend - made it to the other side.  More than a quarter through it me and my sister turned back and went down to the river under pretense of taking pictures of them all, and they were marching through the bridge like it was nothing.  My niece and nephew ran back and forth through it because they are still young and therefore invincible.   We stayed at one ...

I used to draw when I was younger, and I found that I'm equally mediocre in all the mediums I fiddled around with - pencil, charcoal, acrylic paint.  I never really practically understood the skills it took to imagine in well-rounded three dimensions, so even though I shade and highlight using whatever medium, the things I draw inevitably end up like two-dimensional things badly pretending to have shadows and depth.  Something told me that if I were to deliberately stylize my drawings to just two-dimensional things, I would end up drawing just lines and dots.  If, however, I were to do abstract, I would end up doing something concretely incomprehensible. It also didn't help that I did not have shading skills, and that I purposefully choose the types of the mediums that require artistic chops to begin with.  For instance, I insisted on using mechanical pencils for sketching, so I end up straining my wrists repeating inevitably gossamer strokes just to produce what l...

After tutoring unsuspecting students the entire Saturday morning, Pasco and I went out for a drive.  (By that I mean, once again, that he drove and I just happened to be out with him, and it also just happened to be Valentine's day.)  We didn't really plan on going out as a celebration of it, we just happened to be going out, just happened to pass by the restaurant we've been wondering about for months (for the place was always full), and just happened to go in, and later on proceeded to massacre all the food that just happened to be on our table. The food was massacre-worthy: the croquettes were deceptively filling, the steak superb, and the buffalo wings made us hiss inwardly.  We briefly speculated about its hotness level in the Scoville scale, and concluded that it would be relatively low, since those on top would presumably kill anybody susceptible to heart attack.  Still, it did clear my sinuses, and after eating all we could we enjoyed the brief food c...

As per holiday custom I spent some time with my family, who are presently all in San Fernando, La Union.  Before going there I had to stop by Baguio to check if the house is still there, and ended up having my friends clean it.  Had I taken pictures I would've posted them, but I'm sure making chambermaids out of your friends isn't something to be proud of.  They insisted cleaning, and I insisted they sit down, and, as these things go among friends, we all insisted one another while cleaning the house.  I spent one night in Baguio, grateful that I have friends. Off to La Union, where we spent Christmas, and my mother went back here with me to spend a few days with us.  With us also came a young cat. Pasco and I took my mother to the place we went to  here , where the bridge stills smirks from what it thinks is a very clever way of being a bridge. Her vacation ended a bit too soon.  I miss my mother, though I am glad she can walk around unassist...

by Marc Oliver Pasco      This is a story about a goat named Ram.  One day, Ram was walking along a field when he met another goat.      He asked the goat, "Hey. What's your name?"        The other goat replied, "My name is Nick.  Are you a goat?"        Ram was confused. He said, "No, I'm Ram. What's a goat?"      "Well," Nick said, "I'm a goat. And you look like me.  So you must also be a goat."      "No, I'm Ram," Ram said. "And I'm white.  You're brown.  So I can't be a goat."      "Where do you live?" Nick asked Ram. "I haven't seen you around here before."      "I live on the other side of the road," Ram replied. "I came here because I was hungry."      "Oh, okay." Nick said. "Maybe we can look for some grass to eat."       So off they walked to find food.  They found ...

I love Tuesdays for the simple reason that during them I have neither work nor class.  Granted that being a university lecturer makes you take home some of the work, during most Tuesdays I am neither a student nor a lecturer.  The entire day is mine, and entirely at my lazy mercy.  I can walk around the house with just knickers and fluffy slippers on, and go the entire day without wearing glasses or eating proper food or brushing my teeth until I fall asleep from the sheer effort of being unemployed for a day.  Tuesdays are priceless. Recently I have taken to making a pig of myself and a piggery of the bedroom in front of the technological sty that is the television, but sometimes I spend it in the other room, which for lack of a better word and better furniture I will call the "den with a work space in at the other end." My appreciation for Tuesday starts on the Monday afternoon, after leaving work, and I proceed to appreciate the vacancy of my remaining thir...

Friday.  My sister texted me that she was in Taguig, so off we went, in a cab.  She wanted company while waiting for my brother-in-law to finish a two-hour meeting, I think.  And so, according to how these things go in this mega-city, of course the trip took two hours. So all four of us just went to a rooftop bar and looked at the mall's giant dandelion installations, those that light up in time with music.  The effect was beautiful; and it's really something to see at night. I imagine that during daytime it'll just look like protruding lollipops made of plastic bottles littered around grass.  We traded stories over beer (and one mango shake with no milk, please), watched the giant dandelions some more, and went our separate ways.  It was a good night: my sister and I haven't seen each other in a while, and we went to Fully Booked after saying goodbye and bought the absurdly thick paperback of Batman Eternal . Come Sunday and at the invitation of our de...

When I read The Killing Joke  last year (I am quite new to the comic book genre, yes), I appreciated how writers, like Alan Moore, can substantiate a character who, up until then, I didn't give a second thought about.  That was partly because I didn't take reading comics seriously, and partly because I didn't read comics. Fast forward to a year later and I was well into reading some of the more well-known collected story arcs released by DC within the last decade.  There was no system to my reading, however: I just picked up stand-alone works I found lying around the house, or I just downloaded something people would recommend.  To lend a sort of system to my reading, I did what any novice, who just happened to be undergoing some sort of mid-life crisis, would do: search the internet for the Top Ten Batman and Joker anything.  The anachronism of my reading was not lost to me, and half of the time I spent searching through stuff I already downloaded in ...

I was in my second year in high school when someone from I forgot where delivered a lecture about Wasted by Gerry Alanguilan for something I forgot.  Apparently, the only thing that stuck with me was this comic, which I purchased shortly after this person talked about it.  I'm sorry I don't remember her, I would have thanked her for the recommendation. I was very impressed with the thing.  The entire thing - the drawings, the lines, the characters, the story - all these impressed me.  I'd like to think that being an impressionable and inevitably miserable teenager didn't have anything to do with it, although that was arguable.  At any rate,  it was vastly different from the Archie  and the  Funny Komiks  I grew up reading (though I was reading mostly prose in those days, and I was still wondering whether any book can match To Kill a Mockingbird ).  Now and then I could borrow Pugad Baboy  from one of my schoolmates or ...