Blog Archives

My job involves a lot of Facebook.  While I sometimes rue the fact that I don’t do something as exciting as journalism or something as noble as teaching, I love how much I get to read a lot of stories from people with open security settings.  This Christmas, as I was doing the my rounds (sometimes bemoaning the fact that this will have to be part of the Christmas vacation routine), I found some rather interesting stories this season.

There was this girl who broke up with her boyfriend and was experiencing the saddest Christmas ever.  There was this woman who got a whole set of gadgets from her husband.  There are the friends and acquaintances who take the time to greet all of their friends Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.  Although some stories did capture my heart this season: small reminders of what Christmas was all about.

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I read somewhere that the strokes of the Chinese word for anger, “nu,” represent the mind and body becoming slaves to the heart.

Rage – the very thing that fuels grief – hangs like a dark cloud in Hong Kong today.  At least, that’s what the news says.  We can’t blame our brothers and sisters from Hong Kong for putting up those Facebook fan pages, Internet groups, or expressing their anger in spaces all over the Web for the grave (excuse the pun) injustice and indignity their people suffered at the hands of Inspector Mendoza.  Perhaps it is their grief and indignation that they take out on us; after all, the hostage-taker was one of our own.

In the Anguttara Nikaya, the Buddha teaches:

Nothing tends toward loss as does an untamed heart.
The untamed heart tends towards loss.

Nothing tends toward growth as does a tamed heart.
The tamed heart tends towards growth.

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The Benguet bus crash hits so close to home – I’ve travelled that route many times in my life, and that city is home – that I think it’s best for me to keep this somewhat experimental.

Somehow there are always those places where the concrete breaks.  The eroded section of the road is closed, surrounded by bamboo stakes and caution tape, while the construction crew starts repairing the road.  Only one lane of the highway remains open to traffic.  No one really took to repaving the highways; just the old ways of kabiti. That meant hauling the quarried rock over to the eroded area, building a reinforced wall to hold the new pavement, hoping that everything holds.

At least the old Marcitas buses – the ones Father jokes about – are gone.  The air-conditioned buses ply the Marcos Highway – Palispis-Aspiras, whatever one calls it these days – route, while the top-loaded jeepneys, private cars, and buses negotiate the curves of Naguilian Road.

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I decided to die.

Death is welcome.  Too welcome: whether it’s in spectacular form like car explosions, or in something as absurd like choking on a walnut not chewed properly.  A gun in my head can kill me faster than cigarettes and alcohol.  It doesn’t really matter if it’s a slow, painful process or a quick and easy instant: death is welcome.  It’s right there.  Not that life is pointless, or that I’m sad or that I’m depressed.  Death is just there, waiting.

I never gave much thought to death until that taxi ride where I decided to die, for no reason at all.  When you’re cruising through the highway a little above the speed limit, with cargo trucks weaving through lanes with the occasional Porsche speeding along the asphalted shoulder of the road, you think death.  I could die here, whether it’s a spectacular car crash or a hard thud on the barricades.

Then I figured I don’t really have to do that.  Death is welcome; I can die at any instant.  I could just not see tomorrow, and that’s it: I don’t have to get hurt.  I don’t have to feel pain to die.  In that hope of trying to extend your life by cutting yourself away from vice, they’ll catch up with you one day.  You never know when some lunatic will point a gun at the back of your head and shoot.  You never know when that walk on top of an office building will send you hurtling down the ground.  The next thing you know you’ll be with a hundred other people looking at the sunset from the beach, with your trench-coats on, not feeling the sand between your toes.

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One year old.  1, 2, 3.

Two years old.  A, B, C.

Three years old.  Up and down.  Over and out.  Loop-the-loop, pull.

Four years old.  Don’t go back eating Cerelac 20 years from now, okay?

Five years old.  Earthquakes hurt, boy.

Six years old.  Small circle, small circle, big circle.  Small circle, small circle, big circle.  Here’s Mama, here’s Papa, here’s me.  Six times six, 36.  Six times six, 36.

Seven years old.  The Sun is at the center of the solar system.

Eight years old.  In 1521, Magellan arrived in the Philippines.

Nine years old.  Matter has three phases: solid, liquid, gas.

Ten years old.  My very educated mother just sent us nine pizzas.

Eleven years old.  Rahab threw the cord over her window and was spared from the fall of Jericho.

Twelve years old.  Arrange numbers lengthwise in synthetic division.

Thirteen years old.  I indict the Spanish encomendero for making taxes impossible to pay.

Fourteen years old.  Don’t worry about your voice going one octave lower.

Fifteen years old.  It’s not do-re-mi.  It’s solfege.

Sixteen years old.  Mmmm, cigarettes.

Seventeen years old.  Mmmm, vices.

Eighteen years old.  Workers of the world, unite!  You have nothing to lose but your chains.

Nineteen years old.  Everyone has rights, but there are barriers that keep people from exercising them.

Twenty years old.  Keep your head up.  It’s just your heart that’s broken.

Twenty-one years old.  Welcome to the low point.  You either find a way out, or make a way out.  Staying here is no option.

Twenty-two years old.  Someday, everything is going to make sense.  Just not now.  Not yet.

Twenty-three years old.  Straight and narrow.  Straight and narrow.  Straight and narrow.

Twenty-four years old.  All things have a way of falling into place.

Twenty-five years old.  Take everything you learned.  Throw them out the window and learn them all over again.  Oh, and happy birthday.  Life begins again.

During family reunions, my relatives always mention how much I look like my father.  I inherited just about every attribute of Father except for skin color: the same thick eyebrows, the same dark brown eyes, the same deep voice.  For all intents and purposes, I was my dad’s junior, his younger doppelganger, Daddy’s little boy.  He clothed me in the same way he dressed, taught me to speak as articulately as he did.

I’m 24 years old, and half of my life was spent in a very unhealthy, emotionally draining obsession: to get out of my father’s shadow.  I didn’t want to be the conduit to his frustrations and his ambitions.  The loving, caring, decent, devoted family man that is my father took a back seat in my memories.  It was nobody’s fault other than my own to remember my dad in such a different way.

It’s a kind of dreadful shame that I live the rest of my life for: to deserve being in my father’s shadow once again.

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