Featured Blog Entry of the Week 8

Blog ni Jun Lana ang featured blog entry ko of the week. Batikang manunulat sa pinilakang tabing. Teacher ko nung second year college, Creative Writing 101, at memorable kasi first time ko makakuha ng flat uno sa buong buhay ko. (in all, mga 4 times lang ata sya mangyayari sa akin, hehe). Ang saya basahin ng blog niya, nakakaaddict sobra.

ASL PLEASE by Jun Lana

Chapter 1: Luigi

May ka-eyeball na sana ako kung hindi lang biglang tumawag si Dondon. Umiiyak ang bakla. Nag-away na naman daw sila ng jowa niyang OFW sa Singapore. Feeling niya may ka-affair na Intsik. Hate pa naman ni Dondon ang mga Intsik. Saka mga Koreano.

Sa gitna ng pag-iyak, may naisingit pang joke si Dondon tungkol sa mga Koreano:

May lumulubog daw na bangka. Sakay ang isang Amerikano. Isang Hapon. Isang Koreano. At isang Pinoy.

Para hindi sila lumubog, kailangang itapon nila ang mga dala-dala nila.

Yung Amerikano, tinapon yung laptop niyang Mac.

Yung Hapon, tinapon din yung gadgets niya.

Siyempre yung Pinoy, tinapon yung Koreano.

Racist. Pero heartbroken si Dondon kaya wala akong choice kundi makinig lang sa kanya sa phone.

Sayang. Kung hindi tumawag ang bakla, 16 year-old na Thomasian sana ang ka-eyeball ko. In fairness, guwapo (kung pics niya talaga yung nasa friendster ha), at mukhang mabait.

Sa experience ko, basta UST student, sweet lover. Parang driver. Although karamihan sa kanila, walang car.

Unlike UP students, hindi sila basta-basta umaalis pagkatapos labasan. Yayakap sila, makikipagkwentuhan. And they have nice feet.

Ang mga taga-UP kasi, masyadong kumportable manamit, ang hilig-hilig mag-tsinelas. Kundi tsinelas, sandals. Ang dudumi tuloy ng paa.

OK rin ang Ateneans. Kasi karamihan, may car. At sobrang generous. Mahilig mag-treat bago makipag-sex.

Yung isang Atenean na naka-fling for over a year, Philosophy student na hippie at kamukha ni Jesus.

Kaya every time magsi-sex kami, feeling ko I’m being blessed.

La Salleans are the worst. Sobrang vain. Lalabasan na lang nakatingin pa rin sa mirror, tinitingnan kung ayos pa rin ang buhok nila.

Honestly hindi ko alam kung anong kamandag meron ako, pero somehow, attracted sa akin ang mga 16-year-old. Not that I mind. Besides, sex lang naman yun. Fling. Nothing serious.

Pero pag relasyon ang pag-uusapan, I prefer guys na mas matanda sa akin. Yun nga lang, most of them, hindi mo maasahan masyado pagdating sa kama, kasi

1) hanggang round 1 lang sila, and

2) yung tamod nila hindi na pumupulandit.

Pag nilabasan sila, parang Lunes lang. Parang ordinary day. Hindi event. Unlike teenagers. Parang laging New Year. Laging may fireworks. Eh weakness ko pa naman yun.

Weird ko raw sabi ng friends ko. Kasi sila, ang weakness:

1) men in uniform

2) men with dimples

3) straight guys and

4) si Piolo Pascual.

Eh bakit ba. Kanya-kanyang trip lang yan. Sa weakness ko ang pumupulandit na sperm, ano’ng magagawa ko?

Pero sabi ko nga, sex lang yun. Pagdating sa relasyon, mas dependable ang older guys. Kasi siguro pagod na silang magloko. O paulit-ulit na silang naloko. O pareho. Kaya serious sila sa yo.

Minsan sobrang serious, first date nyo pa lang gusto nang makipag live in. Kasi they want to take care of you. Syet.

Yung fag hag friend kong si Lei, older men din ang type niya. Pero ibang rason.

Kasi kumpara sa mga bagets, mas magaling daw sila kumain ng pwet. Eh yun ang weakness niya. Babae yun ha. See? Kanya-kanyang trip talaga yan.

Pagdating sa relasyon, hindi ko pa talaga naranasang mabakante. Actually ngayon lang. Pero two weeks pa lang naman kaming naghihiwalay ni Jonas mula nang umalis siya nang walang paalam sa condo dala-dala ang

1) briefs ko at

2) yung Paul Smith pants na binili ko pa sa Hong Kong.

Yung briefs, OK lang. The fact na niloko niya ako, OK lang. Pero yung Paul Smith pants, shit siya. Pag suot ko pa naman yun, bilog na bilog ang pwet ko.

Shit talaga siya. Dapat nakinig ako sa instincts ko nung una kong na-meet si Jonas sa isang concert ni Regine Velasquez.

Ang moral lesson: Wag papatol sa mga baklang sobrang obsessed kay Regine. Kasi chances are, diva rin sila. Diva na nakakalbo. Hahaha!

Skeri

This is a first for me: reading blow-by-blow accounts of unfolding big news while far, far away from home. Nothing really big happens when I happen to be abroad. Well, I do remember being in Singapore in 1998 for a debate tournament when Joseph Estrada captured the presidency, but there was no Internet back then and it was something that everyone expected anyway.

Right now, I’m ten thousand miles away from home in bitter-cold Sweden and reading about Trillanes walking out of his hearing and taking to the streets. Thank God for inquirer.net and abs-cbn online, and of course, for free hotel wi-fi.

But no one — absolutely no one — relays the news better and more colorfully than my alarmist, reyna-ng-agit-prop mom who texted me around 3am Sweden time, as the whole of Scandinavia sleeps:”HALA, BAKA MA-THE TERMINAL KA DIYAN!!!!”

Note to Self

Some days you feel that nothing ever seems going your way and your life is Murphy’s Law-reality-TV. Failed to meet an important self-set deadline last week because of a series of hitches and glitches and I happen to take pride in the fact that I always meet my deadlines. ALWAYS. Sometimes by the skin of my teeth, sometimes through some cosmic intervention, but I always find a way of delivering on time. So when something like this happens, even if it’s not really my fault (but the fault of idiots running our national agencies who claim that SIGNED lease agreements entered into by the Philippine government are not public documents and hence are not covered by the right to information, JUSKUPONGPINEAPPLE!!!), it throws my equilibrium off in a major way.

And it doesn’t help that in the next ten days, I will be in Bulacan, Stockholm, Quezon, Aklan, and (possibly) Iloilo. Amazing race talaga itoh, bawal magkasakit!!! Haggard haggard haggard.

So I feel the need to remind myself that amidst this stress and personal frustrations, I am deep deep down inside, one happy little camper who doesn’t need much to be happy. It’s a message that bears repeating, if not to the rest of the world, then at least to myself.

This is my Friendster “About Me”:

At twenty seven, I like that it still takes so very little to make me happy. I like taking long morning walks on a tree-lined street all by myself and watching old couples teach each other tai-chi. I like getting my fingers sticky with drippy drops of dirty ice cream, and then licking them off afterwards. I like bursting into song in public places and going anting-anting window shopping in Quiapo. When I’m sad, I eat spam and watch Sound of Music and then I’m ok again. I like backrubs and Happy Meals and deep kisses and children’s books and white chocolate and salmon sashimi, not in any particular order and certainly not all at the same time (except maybe white chocolate and deep kisses ). I can laugh at myself and do so a lot — I like to think that means I stand on solid ground. I love long bus trips to Quezon and getting compliments for my cooking. I think life is too short to be wasted on perfunctory embraces and cowardice disguised as prudence. I like living and laughing and dreaming and dancing and hoping and forgetting and remembering.

(This is me with my cousin Maree, the smartest seven-year-old in the planet. Once, when I was visiting them in Iloilo, she noticed that I was wearing a gold necklace with a crucifix. “Why are you wearing a cross, Ate?” she asked me. After thinking for about two seconds, I got into full good-Ate mode and replied, “So I will always remember Jesus Christ.” She furrowed her brows and then sniffed smugly. “Why, sometimes you forget?”)

The Parable of the Laptop Adaptor

One day isang araw, habang nagtatrabaho sa opis, narealize ko na naiwan ko pala sa bahay ang adaptor ng laptop ko. Syempre slight na-stress ako. Ayoko na bumalik pa ng New Manila dahil maantala trabaho ko. Sinubukan ko yung adaptor ng isang ka-opismeyt ko na out of town. Ayaw pumasok sa socket ng laptop ko. Iba yung shape. Sinubukan ko yung adaptor ng isa ko pang ka-opis na andun pero willing magpahiram. Wala pa din. Di pa din kasya.

Then last chance nalang. May isa pang adaptor na pwedeng hiramin kung umandar. I tried it. Aba… eksakto. Pumasok yung plug. Yahoo. Di ko na kailangan umuwi.

Ngunit…. nung in-ON ko na yung laptop para tingnan kung nagchacharge, hindi pala. Battery critical pa din. Sigh.

So anong dapat natin matutunan, mga kids?

Our lesson for today is: Hindi porke physically compatible, e compatible na talaga.

Featured Friend of the Week 7

Manipulative. Materialistic. Wicked. Incorrigibly charming. Bad to the bone. He accuses me of — gasp! — trying to seduce him one drunken rainy night in the late 1990’s and I accuse him of historical revisionism (This I will say: I never, ever initiate seduction. I just, um, ratify it. Hehe.) Of course, it doesn’t help my case any that two years after, Mori came out of the closet, with a feather boa and a flourish. And this story is what he tells OVER and OVER, to RANDOM people.

That “thorn” in our friendship notwithstanding, Mori is one of my oldest and dearest friends. We couldn’t be living in more different worlds — he rubs elbows with Judy Anne and Piolo and wins stuff like the KBP Golden Dove and I, well, I guess I live a less showbizy life. We don’t meet often, maybe just twice a month, but when we do, things magically go back to how they were before. We get transported back to college, before the real world kicked in and when a tattered green tent in the parking lot of FC still held all our dreams.

Cheers, Mori. I love you, bakla.

I’ll Burn the Bridge When I Get There, by Carlos Mori Rodriguez.

I admit.

I have been holding on to a delusion for more than two years. It isn’t any of the typical delusions that would lead one to stalk, maim, and go single white female over another. It’s more masochistic, actually. My unwillingness to accept the truth blinded me from the screaming red light. It was a messy fit from the get go. Worse, I was the last to know. Six months after it all began, everyone else around me knew where it was headed. Dogs knew it. Everyone knew about it except me.

It’s not as if the delusion was clinical — bordering the line, maybe, often times stepping on the danger mark — but hindsight being 20/20, I realize that I may have pushed the envelope too far. You see, this is absolutely atypical of me, which is why I consider this a life-changing experience. I have always been able to control my emotions and I knew when something had less chances of survival than an angler fish out of water. But this one really had me fooled.

You know how all your friends (mostly the married, kept ones, but especially the bitter and envious ones) tell you that despite your standards, you’re bound to end up with someone completely out of your league? And that when the big L word comes, you lose your sense of self and graciously give in to, well, selflessness? I believed them. True enough, this grand philosophy implanted itself in my subconscious and whenever I am faced with the opportunity to save myself from an eternity of isolation, it rears its ugly, amorphous, shiny-shimmering-splendid head. The delusion I speak of is the spawn of one such opportunity more than two years before today.

When you make it your daily goal to prove that you can rise from the ashes of a miserable, failed relationship, you unconsciously put your guard down. Suddenly it’s like Sudan with UN peacekeeping forces or the ‘tetanus’ phase of a really bad diarrhea attack. It really is a dandruff away from desperate. But, of course, vulnerable would be the word of choice.

Grand Philosophy X, which is how I will call my friends’ unsolicited advice henceforth, and ‘vulnerability’ are the equally promiscuous parents of my 2-year old autistic kid, aptly named Marty — short for martyr. And boy, was this kid spoiled. When he was barely six months old, he would keep me awake the entire night, make me skip work, and throw tantrums left and right. On his first birthday, he was already speaking in tongues — complete paragraphs of unintelligible ramblings that, quite suspiciously, sounded defamatory to my parental skills. At 2-years, he became curiously attached to alcohol, profanity, and bestial pornography. Quite recently, he would dress himself in otherworldly fashion — creating a wild ensemble composed of lingerie, silverware, Ziplock, and double-sided mounting tapes. This came before he started writing hieroglyphs on walls using chicken blood and leprechaun manure, declaring that the end is near and chanting the remaining hours until the next Heroes and Greys Anatomy episodes would be available for download on Torrent.

I predict that, in the next few months, he’d be surfing the internet for sites that promote hate crimes, instructions on creating a nuclear bomb, or maybe downloading the PDF version of the cult classic, From Anthrax With Love. It won’t be long before he grows into someone I will no longer recognize. It won’t be long before I start scheduling consults with Dr. Katz, or divesting my money in favor of psychiatric insurance.

Last night, while Marty comfortably sprawled on my favorite expensive shaggy silk carpet, I pinned him down, decorated his head with cling wrap (an entire roll), tied his arms and legs with barbed wire and sliced open his throat. I watched him die a slow, painful death. My tears (eight in all, I counted) fell on a thick pool of autistic blood. A few minutes and epileptic attacks later, he was exactly the way I wanted him to be — motionless and silent. Easy, I thought. He didn’t even fight for his life. No bites, scratches, or saliva-slinging like a retard on a birthday party parlor game. And just like Simon Cowell when Sanjaya was booted out of Idol, I was slightly disappointed.

I admit. I killed my own kid. I confess to a heinous crime… against myself. I ended the life of a two-year old problem child whose existence gave me much pain… but nonetheless negated any and all suspicions I had… on my potency.

Marty’s remains now lie three inches under the wooden laundry basket in the unused room of my three-bedroom home. Flowers and any such offering from friends, family, or loved ones, are prohibited. Visits are out of the question.

When the day of reckoning comes and people ask me what’s become of the son I so proudly called my own, I’ll tell them exactly what I hurriedly scribbled on his death certificate: Drowned in a Fire.

Please?

I believe in the universe. The universe will not fail me. And because Your power is vast and limitless, we will be able to file the petition with no glitch and no hitch. Complete. On time. (Before I leave for Sweden.)

Sige na po. Pers taym ko po magfifile ng ganito. I worked so hard for this. This means so much to me.

p.s. First installment pa lang ito ng dasal ha. Next time po ang dasal ko na e ma-grant ang petition ko with a declaration of unconstitutionality galing sa aming mga butihing mahistrado.

;-)

Sometimes I love you.
Sometimes I don’t.
But I never ever, never want to let you go.
The road’s not easy.
But the feelings are strong.
It’s the little things that keep me holding on.

- Gabrielle “Sometimes”

This is as clear as it gets: Don’t Watch Lions for Lambs

Let’s just get this straight: I didn’t hate “Lions for Lambs” because I disagreed with it. Let’s get this straight too: this is a young anti-war, anti-imperialism activist speaking. I think George Bush is an idiot and that for the love of God, he should send the boys home.

That said, don’t even bother watching this pompous, self-indulgent, self-important, extremely tiresome movie that even the luminous Meryl Streep cannot save.

I had a sinking feeling in my stomach when the opening credits started to roll by showing graphs and tables of the current President’s approval rating and survey results of the public pulse on the War on Terror (with the camera lingering longer than necessary on the title that says “Survey on the War on Terror”, just in case we don’t immediately get it.) But I had high hopes, owing to the fact that Meryl Streep had decided to do the film.

The movie is basically composed of three intertwined stories, all happening in just a span of a few hours. There’s the story played Tom Cruise, playing the role of a charismatic senator (reprising pretty much his persona in “Magnolia” — so yawn) trying to convince a liberal journalist played by Meryl Streep to help prop up the PR of a new military strategy involving the deployment of smaller-sized platoons to Afghan pockets. Meryl’s role is one uninspired cliche — part hard-nosed Murphy Brown, part “where have all the flowers gone, oh when will they ever learn” hippie. You sort of understand that the objective is for the exchange between Meryl and Tom to provoke your own discussion on the merits or demerits of US war policy while walking to the parking lot, but really all it provokes is an annoying headache. And not from thinking and analyzing, but from trying to stay awake.

The other story takes place in a faculty room, where a student is consulting his professor (Redford) about his low grades and the student whines about how nothing ever means anything to him anymore. And Robert “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” Redford gives a long boring Gandhi-inspired speech for about one-third of the movie on how “one must be the change he wishes to see in the world”. Oh and he talks about his two students who decided to join the war, over his vehement objections.

Cut to the third story. These two students themselves become the first victims of the new, but ill-conceived strategy of smaller platoons infiltrating Afghan desert pockets. This story was for me the best among the three, primarily because it did not involve two people talking to each other. It at least involved two people talking to each other WHILE trying to stay alive and then eventually dying in a rain of billets.

This movie isn’t about stating the Obvious. This movie is about turning the Obvious into one hard compact brick and then bludgeoning the hapless viewer on the head several times with it until her head cracks. Insert manipulative musical scoring at strategic intervals. Like when Meryl makes the super-fresh, super-revolutionary insight that media has blood in its hands for being an unwitting pawn in the War of Terror. Or when the foul-mouthed student realizes he is in the presence of true and profound greatness. Or when the two kids are about to die and there is a montage of shots of their young lives. (cinematic cliche number 27).

And because — after everything — we STILL might not get it, we have a final shot of Meryl Streep sitting pensively in a taxi, eyes welling with tears, looking at the notes of her interview with Tom Cruise. And then suddenly glancing out of the window, as the taxi passes by a cemetery memorial for fallen soldiers. No sophisticated metaphors for this movie, apparently.

I should just have watched the John Lloyd-Bea movie.

“General, what is happening to our country?”

Was having a quiet dinner and a few drinks last night with Enteng when Emman texted that a bomb had gone off in the South wing of Congress a few minutes before. As Risa’s office is in the South wing, all I cared about at the time was making sure that our friends working in the House were alright. I called Clang, but she was not in Congress at the time and in fact had only heard of the news from me. When I got to Kit, Risa’s Chief of Staff, her voice was shaking but she assured me that they were all together and no one from Akbayan had been harmed. “Ang lakas lakas, Jae, parang may lindol,” she said.

Then after a few minutes, the flash reports on TV came and we saw footages of the aftermath. The ceiling had caved in and there was chaos and pandemonium everywhere. There were people brought to the hospital on account of serious injuries. Later, the sad news came in that three people had died, including Cong. Wahab Akbar of Basilan.

Of course, this raises serious questions of security. I used to work at the House of Representatives before passing the bar, and I know first-hand that the security measures taken by the guards there are perfunctory at best. Unless there’s a state visit or it’s the day of the State of the Nation Address, the guards don’t even make an effort. (Well, except for the time they confiscated my Body Shop glow enhancer because they thought I was going to use it for some subversive purpose — but that’s another story for another time…)

But really, more than the House security concern, what the fuck is happening?!?! The situation is getting to be downright scary. A bomb goes off in the lower chamber of the legislature, on a workday and immediately after Session was adjourned, killing three people and injuring scores others — no, we are not living in normal times anymore.

Oh, and please don’t bring in a bunch of experts to tell us this is another methane gas explosion.

Tough Guys Don’t Dance

 Good night, Mr. Mailer.