Whispers in Pure Concentration

Lord, protect my family.

Universe, keep me at my humblest and therefore wisest.

Lord, make me fast and accurate.In my anger and in my restlessness, let me respond quickly and make a calm assessment.

Universe, I am one with you.

Lord, forgive us and let us learn.

The Forgotten Among the Senses

In the convergence, in the transactions of our noses with the world, we yield a subtle yet powerful perception. Smells, however, are harder to store in the compartments of memory. Smells are rarely celebrated and cherished. Our eyes have pictures and a wide array of art or visuals. Our ears have music, and our taste buds has gone from salty, sweet, bitter or sour to the explorations of molecular gastronomy. But there are no gadgets or even art and too few sciences that aid our noses the way our eyes and auditory canals are given an additional sense of urgency and importance.

Taken for granted, smells are the most underrated of all the senses. There are also, too few scents, and an even fewer emphasis on scents.

I've often divulged how I've developed an addiction to the smell of books. I enjoy the smell of a book often as equally as I read its contents. More important than our sense of touch, we are more deeply acquainted with a book through its smell. It defines it as an object, lingering not just words but through its smell - the worldliness it has contracted. How it grows, and even what were you like at the time you read it. Does it smell of cigarettes, of a floral soap, of a bookmark, of coffee, the ephemeral nature of its inevitable oldness or of mold? And this maybe the reason why some of our new technology does not work for me. I’m turned off by generic smell, or its absence of an aqcuired and unique property. More than the characters in the book, the smell gives it an unseen character of its own.

Now that I've got a point or two established around the forgotten among the senses, I say what I want to say. I don't want to look at my life now. I want to sniff how my life is like now.

It's obvious what my favorite scent is among the prevailing scents of my life. It's how my six-month old son smells. We can take all sorts of pictures of him, but we cannot trap all these exact smells and put it in a bottle. It will never be the same again: this current smell of coming home. So here it is now: the candid smell portrait in free association.

Burt's Bees apricot baby oil before he takes a bath. The soaps that stay in the fabric of his clothes and what my nose absorbs when I kiss his tummy: Perwoll for babies, Perla white bar. The cream we thinly apply on his skin for diaper rashes or skin allergies: Desitin, Indigo Jar of Hope. The smell of his shampoo on his hair and body wash on his skin: Chicco and Top to Toe. The neutral smell of his refuse (as he is still exclusively just having his mother's breastmilk, no solids). His vomit. The milk that remains on the corners of is mouth, the spilled milk on his clothing. And lastly, the most elusive, almost indiscernible and sweepingly beautiful smell: his breath. It is a distinct, pleasurable smell.

His breath has the smell of life and clarity, of someone who drank something so potent. It smelled of my truth. The smell that told me, not only is the little one alive, the little one has a soul.

I sniff deeply. If only I could wear this scent.

The Family Shoe Haiku

a new pair of shoes
to move our feet, our voices
it's a perfect fit

Shuffling Back and Forth

Of the fine tuning and tweaking my work situation required, more than the people I have to manage and the departmental business units mine has to partner with, or the obligations I have to be accountable for, it’s the proximity of the other site I oversee that I really needed to adjust to. It’s what made me hesitate all this time. A matter of location kept that fast lane to a promotion clogged. I didn’t want to be inconvenienced with driving or commuting to a site that’s not fifteen minutes away from home. I wanted to stay with the familiar laps.

Or perhaps I refused to take up promotions because I didn’t want to be in another rat race. On hindsight, all these refusals of promotions over the years and the career drone of staying in a low-key supervisory level for most of my twenties actually paid off. While still gaining hands-on trade knowledge and deepening my competencies, it also helped me account for all other areas of my life and build a lifestyle that I can maintain. That drone also warded off the stress I could have encountered if pushed myself to be higher up the ladder knowing that I need to muscle my way through. If I did insist on success, or to throw all of myself towards a career, I couldn’t have ended with the life that I cherish now.


I often think that the call-center industry grew too fast. The industry leaders are often all too young, aggressive but inexperienced, and pushed into positions because of need instead of merit. If that happened to me, I know I would expend too early.

Here I am now, at my own, still-peaceful pace. In running terms, I won’t be chasing the Kenyans. Somebody else is going to win this race. The only person I have to win over is myself.

Unlike many other players, I didn’t gamble on going all-in. I guess any idiot could have gone to where I am now given the right persistence. But I saw the danger of letting this job eat me whole (or maybe it has). Whether it’s eaten me or not, this is how I played. I chose what I thought was the right time to put my chips on the table. I say cheers to the others who’ve already grown a more sizeable stack. I’ve lived to enjoy certain comforts and I’m still in the game. In the end, while I don’t have that much, I am grateful for the humility and grace I’ve gathered.

I’m amused with how I make out the humility and grace as part of what drives me in my new position at work. It complements the industriousness I imagine I have. On top of the long 11-12 hours I usually spend working, coming home is now a 2-3 hour commute. I shuffle back and forth the two sites, hurrying to make it in time for the office-provided shuttle on the way, and floating sleepless on the bus or train on the way back.

Humility, grace, strangely, blessedly keeps me on. But ultimately, the truth that makes all these ventures worth taking is coming home. Coming home to D. and Mighty Mighty.

For them I’d shuffle back and forth a thousand times over. For them I’d bleed myself dry.

Ala-"Maxims and Arrows." (Or also, possible tweets)

“If you take one step towards God, he runs to you.” – Pi, p. 61. Suffice it to say, as well, that opium is addictive.


While in transit, or while being shuttled, audio books transport you to somewhere else.


The devil known as dull conformity is often mistaken as righteousness and linear thinking.


Ordinariness is a temptation. As in “The Last Temptation of Christ.”


I may have been at fault in restricting myself to the familiar options and winning my own familiar battles. In truth I caved in to my own fears, or at the very least hid myself in a shell of convenience.


The first few pages of Sabbath's Theater by P. Roth: a more cerebral soft porn.


Process Philosophy. The Law of Transformation. Dr. Manhattan. Heraclitus. Buddhism. Change.


Maybe half or even three quarters of my life is over, who the fuck knows? Thus far, and most especially recently, it’s been a good life. And by all means, I’d repeat every little bit of it. Especially now that I’ve learned to live it with more humility, appreciating the salient details, thankfully receiving what I have as a wonderful blessing, and peacefully settling with what I do not own.


And everything I do now, I can do with so much resilience. And I think all the whining waned. My writing voice sounds calmer.

We Are Almost Standing Up

With having Mighty Mighty, the tides are on tilt to peak at a crest. By now, he’s already turning on his stomach. He’s nearly 7kg strong. I have seen him every day of his life and I see life begin over and over again in him, making me zealously live even more fiercely, repeatedly.

Today, at five months, I saw how on his own legs, in that twist of the literal and the figurative, he tried to stand up.

Pure Incoherence (or, a declogging of the writer’s block)

“Over and over we begin again”
- from Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen.

Yes begin with a quote like that.

November is a bundle of new impressions. I recognize some of the new impressions as a logical result of the old or as a result of a process. On the other hand, some of them still bewilder me. Very liberally, these new impressions streamed towards me and the raw simplicity of the experience makes me glad I stopped restricting myself and decided to, in many (albeit conventional) ways, open the doors.

Perhaps it was only D.’s spirit of adventurism that drove me. Perhaps it was her readiness to venture out to unfamiliar territory, to live what I usually just imagine, to let the experience of the world liberally (and as though in a natural control and calculation), beautifully gush forth. Over the five years, I travelled once or twice out of the country and out of the city for work. In both occasions and in all those places, I longed for her. And as I longed for D., I also discovered so much of myself. I figured how I have interpreted and processed the impressions I collected. I wrote the impressions I collected. As I did then, I do now, I write.

Mighty Mighty Delicious

We've taken Mighty Mighty along with us to several of quick-escape dinner or lunch dates and he always seemed glad to tag along. Breastfed exclusively since the day he was born, D. prepares expressed breast milk in a bottle so we can enjoy a lunch or dinner out while I. feasts on his. He's usually in a sling, a carrier or a stroller. The wait staff seem genuinely pleased to see I. And I say that because they have a non-artificial glow that light up like a 20% tip.

With our stomachs stuffed, our little family settles in a peace filled with protein, carbs, tastes, textures and conversation that make me say (without saying), "Let's do this all our lives."

We had crabcakes and a four-flavor pizza on our first lunch out with I. 3 months ago.

This evening took a little bit of a different tide. We're in a fairly pricey Steakhouse in Ortigas coming off the Halloween Trick or Treat in D.'s office. Our Mighty Mighty was clad in a Kimono, and later – he donned a statement Onesie that says "Rockstar" (the second costume a necessity because he had his goo all over the first one), Mighty Mighty was splurged with a lot of attention, never cried or went fussy. With all those compliments, we were very lucky parents.

Down at the Steakhouse, he was quiet as we start with the complimentary roasted nuts. We asked for seafood chowder, medium Long Iron steak along with mashed potatoes and grilled shrimp on the side.

On the table to our left, four girlfriends in office uniforms munch on nachos and Buffalo wings, and across us I see an old foreigner having a beer. The place was dimly lit, and the wait staff was all chipper and looking extra proactive as though their blood ran on Red Bull.

Mighty Mighty started to cry, and he wouldn't stop crying despite all of D.'s proven formulas that would normally settle him. Mighty wouldn't stop crying and it was quiet all around so it was mostly him that everyone hears. Despite our hunger and sleeplessness we didn't exaggerate the panic as it applies to this situation. We got the look from customers but nobody confronted us. For a moment, I prepared with how I might remind anyone who have dared. I would have said, “this is Ortigas, not New York.” For the first time since we became parents, we knew it was happening.

D. took our Mighty Mighty outside where a Korean lady who also dined at the restaurant saw him in his tantrum. The lady asked if she can carry our baby. D. resolutely said no.

We smiled politely and softly said sorry to the wait staff, having our order to-go instead of eat-in. And off we went, homebound in a rush-hour. I. slept in the car. We talked about how D.’s officemates adored our Mighty Mighty, and how I. kept on staring at another kid’s The Flash outfit.

D. didn’t need to tell me that pretty soon he will be insisting that we go to Jollibee. I also thought, that wouldn’t be bad at all. I thought, Chickenjoy, Palabok Fiesta, and how even self-service sounded like an oxymoron because it’s actually more convenient.

We got home rather quick and Mighty Mighty. was soothed and smiling again. We spread the take-out in our home dining table and chewed on the soft, pinkish meat. It’s delicious.

Less than an hour earlier, we were being devoured by something like embarrassment. Neither us of us snapped. Being eaten up like that for the first time, we must have been just as delicious.

Two More Books and 124 Days of I.

How I stumble upon the time to read is a sort of a low-level miracle. It’s like discovering you had a stash of money you thought you didn’t have anymore.

Aside from Miguel Syjuco’s Illustrado and Martin Amis’ The Rachel Papers, I managed to tuck in two more books to the shelves over the past couple of months. Those were Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and Italo Calvino’s Marcovaldo or Seasons in the City. I bought both of these from BookSale, where book-buying need not be profligate, and buying itself is a cheap thrill. While they aren’t as nasally pleasant as the freshly-printed copies in more expensive bookstores, the joy of finding them amongst straight-to-the-bargain-books is an unmatched, unexpected happiness. And these copies are in mint condition.


I’ve been reading these books with I., and even D. admits to having a childlike sense of wonder and anticipation in hearing the stories. Both these books were a wild ride, and reading them and enjoying about them together as a family is like going on a trip to Disneyland.

I imagine that the beautifully simple language where a mirage of flatness masks the deeply ingenious stories would sound familiar to I. We read Italo Calvino to him when he was in the womb. I’m making excuses now, but when I find the time I’ll write down a full inkwell of thoughts around Life of Pi.

My guess is I will find the time. I’m saying that because since our I. was born, I had it all, including some of the things I thought I’d lose. In 124 days of I.’s being-in-this-world, he grew and grew and cooed and cooed.

And I understood why I should long, even more intensely, to repeat the last 124 days and the twenty-nine years of my life. Because in some parallel universe, I.’s fond smiles are flashing again, I am hushing him again, telling him stories of the lower-class Italian families in the 50s and 60s, or shipwrecked Indian Boys in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. I am listening to music with him again. I am watching him sleep with his D. in the morning, or watching him sleep with mama before I leave for work at night, making my woes vanish into thin air. I. is staring wide-eyed into me again, and we peer into each other’s souls.

In truth, I didn’t just manage to read two other books in 124 days of I.’s being-in-the-world. In the selfless pace of the past four months, everything seemed to have happened. A few days back, I ran my second 21k this year (in a borderline-decent 2:10 finish). I have two serious offers for a promotion that would double my basic income. I recently had two articles published in a respectable online music/culture magazine (getting paid made me feel like a legitimate writer). I’ve gained a few pounds, but I’ve given up smoking entirely. I have spent a lot of time with my families – my own, my parents, and in-laws.

In having I. I have bowed, as I am humbled and selfless, I have to trust in something greater than myself. Much to my relief, I jumped into the abyss feeling more awakened. I have knelt in prayer to God, thankful for the happy arrangement where I arrived amidst all the inscrutable order or chaos.

In scaling myself down, my life fled to an upward trend.

More or Less Enlightened

It’s been the new buzz novel. It’s all over the bookstore window-displays and it’s selling like pancakes. It’s been heralded, awarded the Asian Man Literary Prize before it was published, and flanked with the expected accolades. The publishers even decided to release it in time for the May 2010 elections as a cheap marketing tactic under the guise of helping the voting public become "enlightened."


Not to mention how it’s so cool, you want to be seen reading it, preferably in an overpriced, overrated place like Red Mango or Golden Spoon where a paper-bowl of frozen yogurt is within your easy reach.

Now, the novel possesses that character. It tempts you into finding something flawed with how it was executed or fallacious with how its logic was formed. I tried, and while its imperfections are not so endearing, this local read made a significant leap. It’s the kind of novel that leaves an indelible imprint in your mind. I would have paid more than PHP 298, if not for the poor binding as my copy started to have its pages lose and unglued.

The narrative approach and the ambitiousness reminded me so much of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz). Only, Junot Diaz was more subtle in his transition from a third person to a first person narrative somewhere in the middle of the novel. Now that’s an unimposing technique with a lofty goal that’s surgically and stylishly achieved. Miguel Syjuco seemed to have gone firing away with all the styles he learned in Ateneo and Columbia: he had everything from blogs, poetry, excerpts from a novel-within-a-novel, fictitious newspaper clips, aphorisms, first person narration, and third person narration all in one broth less a cohesive balance. It’s a heavily spiced dish that doesn’t seem to want you to get bored. The novel had grandiose dreams, and it thrown a lot of ammunition, weapons of mass destruction if may - to hit the target.

The novel succeeded in keeping me from getting bored – especially with the serialized ice breakers of Erning Isip to Boy Bastos. It’s a good development in a story, humorously stereotyping what happens to our culture once it’s homogenized into American culture.

As I leisure my way into so many of the writing styles, I pause to cherish some of the most tasteful phrase formations: toothlessness of exile, mellifluous rhetoric, the pawn making a final sprint to queenhood, having a child as a grand gesture of optimism in this world. I repeatedly read some portions of this book because it sounded so good and it was so cerebrally delicious:

“In those years, young Salvador witnessed the benefits that his father’s position in the collaborationist government provided their family, and he experienced and swallowed, for the first time in his life, the alluring palatability of necessary hypocrisies." P.149

The most moving piece was on the character Mutya Dimatahimik’s story on p.204. During a Marcos-era protest demonstration, a poet, who was five months pregnant, lies in front of an advancing tank. In the page after he went on about Seamus Heaney’s “No lyric has ever stopped a tank” and ranks that act alongside the efficacy of literature or poetry. Perhaps I was touched that deeply because D. was in her third trimester of pregnancy when I read the book back in May.

Miguel Syjuco writes with an impressive versatility and authenticity. The dialogues sounded real and unpretentious as though he had the inside scoop. The cono kids really sounded like cono kids who went to Pravda, talking like “Dude, you have?” You knew this author was for real right from page 1, when he chose to have the character wear Ermendegildo Zegna trousers and you easily surmise that he’s wearing a pair, himself.

The level of specificity to substantiate both characters and the advocacy was in some parts laid out nicely:

"Together, Madison and I moaned about how CNN had stopped calling it Communist China, except during negative new stories about lost American jobs or consumer safety violations."

Fearlessly and precisely, he went on to satirize the character of Filipino writers as well as the state of Filipino writing.

What is Filipino writing? Living on the margins, a bygone era, loss, exile, poor-me angst, postcolonial identity theft. Tagalog words intermittently scattered around for local color, exotically italicized. Run-on sentences and facsimiles of Magical Realism, hiding behind the disclaimer that we Pinoys were doing it years before the South Americans, and every short story seems to end with misery or redemptive epiphanies. And variations thereof. An underlying cultural faith in Deus ex machina P. 207

He knew the traps he should avoid. He didn’t give in to, and even exposed the pretentiousness of the Philippine literati. Filipino writers always seem afraid to criticize themselves because they’re all friends, celebrating and congratulating themselves in a debt-of-gratitude, scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours culture.

These are the literati of the Philippines: the merry, mellowed stalwartly middle-class practitioners of the luxury of literature in the language of the privileged. Many of them are former Maoists. p.161

The trap he didn’t avoid, however, was the dream of having the novel become some kind of modern-day Noli Me Tangere. It appeared as though he wanted to write an expose-book that will move the nation to revolutionary progress. But while it’s a good story, he didn’t really tell us anything new to wake us up from our national amnesia.

Characters in a novel often give biased and condescending judgements that are not reflective of the author’s views. But a novel’s conscious/unconscious attempt to lean towards an agenda over the other to make it come out in a more favorable magnitude is clearly a message that an author sends out. For example, Miguel Syjuco made himself out to be a schoolist, as he champions Ateneo as some kind of elite utopia. He bashes other schools from AMA to La Salle to UP. The arrogance was an uncalled-for low-point.

I often imagine if successful writers regret some of what they have written. I play on to imagining that this writer probably regrets adding too many of his fantasy chicks in this novel to the point of sounding homophobic. More importantly, he may have left out a certain character undeveloped as though he didn’t have the ending clear in his mind.

And I’m probably wrong. Because endings are virtually non-existent in so-called postmodern novels such as Illustrado.

You just go on talking about it.

A Movable Monument

All traffic enforcers who flagged down the vehicle I was riding (whether I was the one or someone else who was driving) have made a sinister attempt to collect a bribe. They weren’t always successful – because drivers end up dropping names or flashing calling cards or IDs that eventually make the driver involved in the insidious intent. I once told one of them that I worked in ___ (a private company/call center) and surprisingly they just let me through despite my “violation.” The most ghastly, ironic one I heard was from a Pasay Traffic Enforcer: “Para sa bayan naman itong ginagawa natin eh,” as he pockets two hundred.

I drive around those easy-driving areas and I see traffic officers flag down the vehicles (perceivably for that purpose) on a daily basis.

They usually hide themselves like landmines, setting up traffic traps where motorists can easily commit a petty violation on areas where accidents or even traffic jams are not likely to occur. The most common of these vague traffic violations would be “swerving.” You also usually find the “abangers” on rerouted areas where there’s a new “No Left Turn” sign installed in a corner where they previously allowed vehicles to turn left.

Obviously, it disgusts me and I am always at fault in mocking them and their protruding bellies.

With a President who preferred no special treatment on traffic rules, stopping at red lights and being stuck in bottlenecks just like the rest of us, it makes this country a very exciting country to live and drive in.

I drive around an easy-driving area every day, but you have to Schumacher your car over the traps the enforcers set up.

There’s a different sight in the busy EDSA Extension-Macapagal intersection. A traffic enforcer apparently takes on the less travelled route.



I recognize him: burnt, sun-exposed skin, bug-eye shades, white gloves, a thin frame from so much movement. I saw him up close when he filled a gallon of water from a nearby gas station.

He’s there, nearly everyday, in the blazing heat of the 9am sun, or doused in a drizzle, and always blown off by the carbon monoxide emitted by so many mufflers. I recognize him directing the traffic with the demanding labor of moving the entire length of your arms, dancing your body around the four corners of the intersection, risking your life to being swiped by buses or twelve wheelers. Watching him in his human kinetic, dancing around and directing so many vehicles is like seeing a statue of Rizal perform a nation-building deed. More than any bribe, the satisfaction he gets must be pricelessly fulfilling.

It’s a sight of a movable monument physically and dynamically becoming a living testimony of unsung heroism. I say that that because that is what I saw today. For all I know he’d be flagging me down and extorting me tomorrow. This may not be a logical deduction but since no extortion happened, I’ll stick to the better story.

In doing what he does, I imagined how many accidents he’s prevented, how many people he’s kept honest, or how many perceptions he’s changed. How many like me, who’s excitedly on his way home to his wife and child, brings up a hand and points an index finger to the edge of the brow, saluting him for the hero that he is as I turn left - following the many gestures of those white gloves to lead my way home.

Ode to the Writer-Wannabe Call-Centerers (Draft no. 1)

Nag-iba na ang anyo ng gabi.
Nanatili tayong gising,
at hinahayaan sa limot
ang mga ayaw at gusto natin.

Habang intintawid sa dagat ang mga boses natin
nilisan na rin natin ang dati nating mga pangarap

Sa gitna ng lahat ng pangyayari
at ilang ulit na bigkas ng iba't ibang pambungad
at ilang beses kang napahiya
kapantay ng mga sandaling nagpakumbaba
sa kawalan ng gunita
sa dinamidami ng natanggap nating hinaing
sa pera ng iba na bibilangin natin,
nanatili tayong gising.

Ngunit tulad ng mga nalagay sa tahimik,
(at mababaw ang pagkakabaon)
madaling makatakas ang mga bulong:

Ano nga ba dapat ang ginagawa natin ngayong gabi?

Sumasagalit, pumapaminsan-minsan
ang sentimyento na ngayong gabi'y
nagisisilbing panaginip.

Nagiiba ang anyo ng gabi.
Na parang nangangako,
magbabago lang ito muli
sa hindi mo akalain ay

katanggap-tanggap.

A Thank You Note

We see the good-looking gentlemen, the fine ladies, and we notice that these pleasant faces in this crowd are the same people who we spent our Christmases with, went to grade school and High School and College with, we went to work with, got blind-drunk with, gone in trouble with, got old with, attended our wedding, our friend's weddings, baby-showers, bachelor parties, send-offs, and like today - welcoming little ones into the Christian world. We've practically gone through all the milestones together - as family, as friends, and that just makes life more meaningful.

Thank you for gracing our lives in yet another milestone, and hopefully equally, thank you for letting us grace yours.

And we want to thank our Parents, most of all, as they laid the foundations of who we are just as we are doing now for our I. Now that we are parents ourselves, we strive to be like you. To be able to teach them a kind thing or two.

We want to pass on, in particular, what Jesus embodied in his Teachings and his Philosophy – to seek the Truth. It must be the same Truth that shines on us now.

With having our I., we have been blessed. We may not have been as blessed with having greener pastures but we certainly feel that with our bundle of joy, that grass is also green on our side. All through life, we'll work on having him inherit the kindness we found in the world, which is really worth more than anything.

I think most of us saw Into the Wild you know what they say: the only real happiness is happiness that is shared. We thank you for sharing this happiness with us, for keeping this happiness real and more importantly - passing this on to our little ones.

Let's keep our hearts warm. Love all around and let's love each other some more.

J. & D.

Three Full Pages Devoted to Snogging

Reading and Reviewing while Daddying (I read this book two months ago, when my first kid was born.)

The Rachel Papers, Martin Amis. There were Martin Amis books on the bargain and that got me to thinking how there must have been something flawed with literature that got dumped to the discounted shelf. But the truth is – there are a lot of gold mines hidden in that septic tank: Graham Greene, James Joyce, Dante, et.al., waiting to be picked like low-hanging fruits.

The decision-making involved in buying this book was easy because of two major influences.

(a) I browsed through the first few pages and read the phrase, “a chartreuse caterpillar of glinting phlegm.” I flipped through it some more and found the phrase “Dionysian bathroom sex.” I generalize that what those phrases hinted this book as wildly thought-of (to describe phlegm like that) and I’m going to be delighted with either sexual or toilet humor that’s eloquently written.
(b) I never heard of Martin Amis, but Vintage published him in a collection that included Irvine Welsh, Philip Roth, Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky. And this quite-decent edition only costs 99 pesos. Gold mine.

Before reading the book, I googled some reviews on The Rachel Papers and the New York Times (by Grace Glueck) went:

What's lacking is the ability to animate the other characters so that they become more than mere projections of Charles, and to provide the kind of plot invention that would make the book more than an easy-reading, mildly funny series of bed-and-bathroom observations. In the end, I'm afraid, even Charles comes off as too much of a type. I'm sure he'll grow up to work for The Times Literary Supplement.

After having read the book, I was largely against the stand of the review I found in the New York Times.


This was Martin Amis’ first novel and very early on he was armed with a powerful vocabulary, along with the ability to put words well and together. More importantly, he had a grand, accurate notion of how it is to be Nineteen Years Old. Aside from the natural self-obsession of teenagers on zits and things, here are three more things to describe the protagonist, Charles Highway:

(a) "the big thing about me is that I wank a devil of a lot."
(b) He can make a girl bleed out “all dignity in a series of hot, fetid squirts.”
(c) He does research and notes for dates (e.g., sees movies the day before he goes out on a date to see the same movie).

Forgive the misogynist quip, but the NY Times reviewer probably lacked male hormones (i.e., balls) and the resulting similar experiences of embarrassment that came with having a load of those hormones. And it all comes out perfectly funny and entertainingly sexual. To highlight: in pages One Hundred to One Hundred Two, he devotes a full account of snogging. In page Ninety Three he lists Certainties & Absurdities: Anxiety Top Ten. This book is too smart to be the male version of chic-lit.

One of my all-time-favorite movies, The History Boys, comes close to this book. Well, they’re all English teenagers trying to get into Oxford. Except that none of the History Boys employed their intelligence to score. Compared to Charles Highway, the History Boys are all gay and bloody gutless.

Make Out Music Nowadays

It's the end of an era. College kids no longer make out to chillout.

I spotted the band doing a huddle before a set in Saguijo. Their shoulders were and arms were interlocked. Their heads bowed as if in prayer, mumbling something and motivating themselves as though they’re the first five in an Ateneo-La Salle encounter.

There’s not one of them looking like a hipster and when they straightened up, they had that unmistakable, lanky teenage built. Whether it's the tight-fit Lacoste polo shirts or lose-cut pants, whether it’s the skin-pounder’s haircut, the vocalist’s big curly hair, they all end up looking like they can eat double cheeseburgers everyday for breakfast without gaining so much as a pound. And they must be channeling all that lanky teenager, double-cheeseburger energy somewhere. They must be getting a lot. I’m spelling it out, but it could have been the same reason why they call themselves Musical O.

There’s an obvious suggestion in the band’s name, which wonderfully enough – they don’t blatantly cry out in their music. The suggestion they make in their music is fine-tuned and artfully coiled. It’s one that takes some, in Schopenhauerian sense of the phrase - aesthetic contemplation.

Young as they are (and this being their debut album), it sounds parallel to a first experience of, or of a series of memories of the first time of something. This is what I figured out when I aesthetically contemplated Musical O.

Those guitar strings and faint voice start off like the soft bubbles of saliva, simmering in the summer heat, slowly exchanged in the couch. Although the music is clean and the message is clear. They are trying to appear experienced although they obviously don’t have it yet. And that can only be good: music from impressionable young kids with a musical experience that is either untouched or undiluted yet nonetheless talented. It’s honest creativity experimenting, and in a teenage world where everything was exclusively real and good. In itself, the rawness of their real talent is innovating.

This didn't come out in their sucky lyrics (which is all there is to say about it), but in the secret language of very young people, you either understand now, or once understood, what it’s thinly suggesting. It reminds you of your own nature of unsuppressed urges, and when those urges are no longer suppressed something good’s coming out. It’s the suggestive, yet subtle O of this music. Whatever the fuck that means, it made us fumble for something in the bedside and later made us squirt in sensitive places.

If this is a by-product teenage angst, well or unwell, I hope it never pays off. It’s positive. Musical O – may you never get bored and old.

Boring and old me, less my face. The Musical O album is encircled in red.
(This was taken around May this year after we bought the Album at Music One GB3, and stopped for chocolate and cold coffee in a sunny afternoon at the GB5 Max Brenner.)

Writing Unregretful

Only when we have sought it out can we write what is true.

The only time we can write without regret is when we've isolated and reevaluated the impressions we initially construed. Brain waves, if you imagine, are as powerful and loud as thunder and lightning. Writing is a habit of confining the thuds in a quiet zone, where you can have armors dismantled to see what's inside, to hush all that loudness and contemplate it, and then resurrect that sound in writing form.

History was never a matter of reporting the facts and telling the story as-is. Historians have already pre-pondered upon how to weave or treat the fabric of time, distinguish love from infatuation, differentiate a shallow disturbance from a genuine dilemma, and generally account for how an event or a person should be remembered. In looking at what happened in the past, we should be able to explain what we are now. Now that's what's going to happen.



I will not regret what I am about to write now.

If I told this story as-is it would have come out all gooey and chummy like all the parents gushing over their babies. Or maybe even worse. See, I'm more sappy than all the blossoms combined in the garden.

Only that I will not regret writing this now because in the future - I will say it very rarely, if at all, and probably restraining myself at all times. Like my own parents before - this is something that is meant to be demonstrated as opposed to being said.

But you've got to at least say it once, before you may never be able to say it again. We love you, I.

You are your parents' inequitable joy. You're only between 11-12 pounds and around 63 cm in length right now, but you won't be like that for long. Quicker than our heartbeats, you'll grow up and we won't be able to carry you as we do now - like a feather in our arms. Soon enough we we won't be able to hush you too easily when you wail out loud with those quivering lips.

So here we are, in the fifty-fifth day of watching you grow with an out-of-this-world bliss that's countless and unquantifiable. Your mother, quite literally, has never left you, breastfeeding you exclusively and giving you the kind of love that's even more beautiful than romance.

Only in a few months time, you won't be as small. In a year's time, you'll stand on your own. In a few years time, we may not even have the time to write as we busy ourselves with parenting.

The world spins and every thing's transforming and moving so fast so let's remember how it is now. However life transpires, know this: you are our son and will not love you any less than how much we love you now.

However this story goes, we will be home bound.

Strictly from a Third-Party Perspective (I. after 27 days on Earth)

Aside from soiling washable cloth diapers and disposable diapers, he’s essentially into sucking into his mother’s burst-into-porn-star proportions-milk-manufacturing boobies. His lullabies include music from the Smashing Pumpkins, Eggstone, Whitest Boy Alive, Sigur Ros, Jeff Buckley and yeah those obscure (only because they are not-so-heard-of) bands that comprise what they call Post-Rock Instrumental. He also gets a usual blast of Chopin, some classical and his mother’s wonderful singing.

He likes being read to, and so far has not been violently reactive when the passages from Daddy’s books are a little too nebulous, or not exactly recommended by the Infant Censorship Board.

Oh, and he’d be probably be rich as Croesus if he got a cent for every snapshot his parents took, or if he took a cent from friends and relatives who thought he was cute.

His other legitimate activities include burping, hiccupping and finally - farting, wet and loud.

An Organic, Fair-Trade and Sweet Disposition

A rather simple surprise for the wife, who had some success in using washable cloth diapers for our newborn child, our own recyclable canvas bags for our groceries, and generally attempting to be aligned with the more sensible, more environment-conscious trajectory of our times.

The Pilot Sonic Tour: Towards the Expansion of your Musical Palate

ain't it funny how we pretend we're still a child
softly stolen under our blanket skies
and rescue me from me, and all that i believe

Some Determinists postulate that all of life is either already laid out in your genes, or in softer versions – the rest of your life will be determined by how the first few years go about. Some of them will believe that it has to do with the kind of reinforcements you receive. Others will believe that you are either in the stage of subconscious-formation that will go on until your latent years, or that you are immersed in a collective consciousness – with all the world’s historical and cultural archetypes.

The Determinists probably haven’t figured out who among them is right, if at all. But here and now, your parents will have to hand down patrimonies and the building blocks of your dreams.

In the womb, you’ve already been acquainted to the music of the world. In your first few days on earth, we set you off to your first serious sonic trip. Every morning, you still had your dose of classical music with Chopin clinging tightly to the notches of our ITunes “Most Played.” Your mother sang religious songs often, and your father thought that today, you were ready for the Smashing Pumpkin’s Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness.



It’s our pick for the what-would-you-bring-if-you-were-stuck-on-a-desert-island? album.

carve out your heart for keeps in an old oak tree
and hold me for goodbyes-and-whispered lullabyes
and tell me i am still

Of course we only sang/played pre-selected tracks with what we thought were the Pumpkin’s child-friendly dreamily gentle lyrics.

and if i can't sleep, can you hold my life
and all i see is you
take my hand, i lost where i began
in my heart i know all of my faults
will you help me understand
and i believe in you
you're the other half of me
soothe and heal...
when you sleep, when you dream,
i'll be there if you need me, whenever i hear you sing...
there is a sun, it'll come, the sun, i hear them call me down
i held you once, a love that once, and life had just begun
and you're all i see...
and trumpets blew, and angels flew on the other side
and you're all i see, and you're all i'll need
there's a love that god puts in your heart

Really, fuck that Baby Einstein shit.

i've journeyed here and there and back again
but in the same old haunts i still find my friends
mysteries not ready to reveal
sympathies i'm ready to return
i'll make the effort, love can last forever
graceful swans of never topple to the earth
tomorrow's just an excuse
and you can make it last, forever you
you can make it last, forever you

We couldn’t believe that something as wonderful and beautiful as you came out of us.

beautiful, you're beautiful, as beautiful as the sun
wonderful, you're wonderful, as wonderful as they come
and i can't help but feel attached
to the feelings i can't even match
…
don't let your life wrap up around you
don't forget to call, whenever
i'll be here just waiting for you
i'll be under your stars forever
neither here nor there just right beside you
i'll be under the stairs forever
neither here nor there just right beside you

They say you grow up fast. So for all the time we’ve had you thus far, we barely slept and just stared at you.

by starlight i'll kiss you
and promise to be your one and only
i'll make you feel happy
and leave you to be lost in mine
and where will we go, what will we do?
soon said i, will know
dead eyes, are you just like me?

You slept quite fitfully and seemed to share your parent’s tastes.

The Bloody Brilliant Birthing Process, then broken into mobile status messages

23 June, the year of our Lord 2010. It's also the year of the Johannesburg World Cup (and having you felt like a golden goal). A few days after your birth, our country will inagurate our 15th President. In your coming-into-this-world we are compelled to believe not only in the hope of our country's progress, but in a grand gesture of hope, in a re-affirmation of life in general. Even if I grew up reading some Schopenhauer, a lot of people nowadays, myself included, are concentrating on what's workable and positive.

These are very interesting times, I.

Aside from the plethora of new technology, we've also empowered women, we've somehow quelled racism, and we've elevated our environmental consciousness. There's a lot of good music, good books, good places to go to and good goddamn beer. There's alot of posts: post-rock instrumental and postmodernism, post-colonialism, post-event parties, post-fight interviews, Facebook wall posts. There's always a new gadget here and there that has made the world a global village. Somehow we've also built these invisible bridges that allowed us to observe each other microscopically. We've created virtual spaces and a proximity that make us love one another just a little bit more intensely.

And there's a lot of nostalgia to come back to what once has been. Postcards, old architecture, revival music, bound pages yellowed with age, anything that would bring back or make us cling to that fine mesh of authenticity and a wonderful memory.

There's still a lot of povery to alleviate, and there's still lot of violence, hunger, ignorance, cruelty and basically just a lot of sick bastards out there.

But obviously, anak, when you were born your parents were on a high. Fortunately for you, unlike the hippies of the Sixties or Seventies we aren't drugged (anesthesia excluded) or hallucinating and giving you names like Dust, Dharma or Dream. Not that those names are bad.

We are lucid. When you first sniffed the air today, you've also opened a door to a new perception (to borrow from Jim Morrison).

From here on out, our lives are going to take a pivotal turn. And one day, (to borrow from your mother's favorite Chilean poet), you'll make your own way - deciphering that fire.

-----------------------------------------

Sunny, golden, luminous and enlightening as a good novel's ending. It's your last day in the womb. See you in a bit!
June 23 at 7:56am

Admitted to the birthing room and still all-smiles, but will not be too posh to push today.
June 23 at 9:56am

Labor's official. Dilated at 5cm.
June 23 at 10:30am

J. is wearing an oversized scrub suit and listening to the baby's heartbeat on the live monitor.
June 23 at 11:13am

It's going to be bloody brilliant!
June 23 at 11:29am

Still laboring. D.'s been managing powerful contractions so well. Man, I'm married to a very strong woman.
June 23 at 3:53pm

Very shortly now, a miracle's going to happen.
June 23 at 4:42pm

I., 7.87 lbs strong, arrived shortly before sunset on 23 June, 2010. Hello World.

Notes from the Call Center Piece I

Historical Background

It’s 11:15pm in the year 2001. I’m twenty years old and fresh out of a top and therefore overpriced University where I earned a Philosophy degree. I’m aboard a cab en route to the Valero Entrance of PhilAm Life Tower in Makati. The driver’s tuned in to an AM station. Other than AM and the mechanized hum of vehicles and rubber rolling on the asphalt, the streets turn tranquil. It’s a few minutes before midnight and I’m neat as a necktie-wearing 9am-5am office worker. Except that I don’t have to wear long sleeves and a tie. We’re probably the only office in the building who allows (if preferred) their employees to come dressed in shorts, beach sandals, hats, or in the most or least amount of clothing.

Like most obtrusive cabbies, this one asks, what’s my line of work? In 2001, nobody’s ever heard of a call center before. It was a pain to explain. Who would have thought that so much business from the land of milk and honey would come to Ayala corner Paseo through the thick undersea pipes and cables of broadband technology? So I try not to sound condescending and just say,

“Computer.”

With a brush of the familiar, the cabbie lets out a knowing “Ahhhhh.”

“This is only temporary.”

It’s 2010. I, for one, have been working in this billion-dollar “Sunshine Industry” for over nine years. More than being a thriving milking cow, the call-center lifestyle has been re-interpreted in music, literature, invented its own fashion, and even has its own college curriculum. Nowadays there are kids who dream of becoming call-center agents.

We were unknowingly creating a new sub-culture, my so-called wave-mates and I – newly grads who were all riding these cabs or driving their parent’s cars to Valero back in 2001.

Now the cabbies are all over where the call centers are, and I no longer need to explain what my line of work is. Now the conventions are sketched less vaguely.

As call center tunes play along, everyone still thinks this is only temporary.

I also once wrote, “In the trickle of time’s eternal hourglass, in this little existence of mine, something must have even a smidgen of significance; something else must be worth trying.” Oh, I’m going to be a philosopher, sure.

I’m part of an industry that sowed its beginnings in my own time and I often wish I didn’t have anything to do with it. Slowly, wearily, I’m scaling myself down and realizing that this is probably what I’m going to do for the rest of my life.

Nine grueling years. Like all the once wannabe-or-never-was-artists, writers, engineers, nurses, rockstars, architects, and all the ex-real estate agents, airline-reservationists, teachers, we are all literally going to endure the long, long night.

A Nice Manicure

Our country just progressively stepped into the digital age. We've got to give credit to everyone involved – the Commission on Elections, the creators of the PCOS machine, school teachers, the voting public, or even the current and the worst President this country had, for that matter.

The new electoral process is a first solid fix to one of the root causes of corruption and we just hurdled a huge hindrance to progress. Sooner or later we will choose the right leaders and do what we're really suposed to during elections.

It's probably indicative of a hope - that our children will have it better. We might not need to behead our leaders.

Surprise Left

“Surprise Left” is a literal translation of the operative term in Filipino when you’re supposed to drive a girl home but you suddenly take a turn to a motel. Now I know I’m really being a Daddy, because the masculine of our species are supposed to un-strategically understand this crap from their fathers, who want them to live their own lives but make them realize somehow that it’s not a gentlemanly way to go about girls. And that we are never good-looking enough to break girls’ hearts.

What I gathered thus far is that when you become a Daddy you also suddenly and un-reluctantly increase your tolerance levels for corny-ness. You can’t keep a better, self-deprecating sense of humor because you need to mold yourself into a role-model for your child. So your humor is favored to be corny than self-deprecating. This self-consciousness is beginning to come out like a scrambled slice of pathological narcissism. What the fuck is all this for anyway? I’m hoping at the right time, you will read this and that’s the only time it will stop from being just another tree falling soundlessly in the forest that is cyberspace. Now there’s another bad, forced-upon metaphor!

Let’s go back to the Surprise Left now, before I completely digress. It’s Saturday, and we are overcome with a liberating feeling that accompanies most Saturday mornings. It’s the beginning of the weekend. I pick up D. in Ortigas and we enjoy cheap but well-prepared tuna or chicken croissants, iced coffee and grape juice. Engaged in conversation, we naturally weed out our work-related worries. We while away all other uncertainties all-too-easily because the imposing presence in a mother’s belly induces the courage to dream a little more.

That’s probably what drove us to this Surprise Left. I didn’t drive the girl straight home. But we also didn’t go to a motel, especially not now that I already knocked her up. We took a Surprise Left towards the Ikea Store, to order the Sniglar cot, the tastefully inexpensive crib.

And we took home the Lerberg shelf unit. After spending a year on the boxes, the DVD collection is finally out. Like the books, and the music, we want our child to eventually be exposed to what we thought was good. Everything from Studio Ghibli to the Kieslowski’s The Color Trilogy to The Godfather, Amelie, Dead Poet’s Society, History Boys and so on.

One day.



Now don’t be reductive and dismiss that it’s a consumerism-based fulfillment. It’s the feeling of assembling a Lerberg or a Sniglar with on your own hands and how many experiences will flourish on what you assembled. It’s where the Surprise Lefts take you.

The Art of Excusing

Truly, we never run out of excuses to sit down and think rigorously. I can't write now. I can write now because I still have backlogs, or an early gig tomorrow, work later, running behind on chores and responsibilities, running behind on running.

Because of these and similar threads in our stories, our thought-processes are slowly being grinded into bite-sized pieces of new media such as tweets and status messages. It's no wonder how nowadays people can only afford a short attention span. It's also no surprise that nowadays people (or people like me) begin to think in bullets, instead of metaphors or figures of speech.

And for now, since I can't afford genuine thought, what I have are these generalizations and excuses. At least you can't fit this in a tweet.

Last Chance Dating as Husband & Wife

We’ve must’ve had hundreds of these fancy-restaurant lunches and dinners. But with a kid on the way, the last few dates taste more robust in our last-chance savouring. We happily realize that it might be a while before this again.

Of course a lot these dates has to happen in the morning, since we just spent Friday night working in our night shifts. Dates in the morning almost feel like a dream: nice post-work meals with high-noon cocktails (for the soon-to- be-daddy) in near-empty restaurants and no crowds to compete with. I even get to write and read.




This one’s a Japanese-inspired place with a catchy name: John and Yoko.

We started with a seaweed-filled miso soup, especially since seaweed should cover a lot of D.’s calcium requirements. No raw fish or wagyu beef, but definitely a lot of vodka cocktails for Daddy.

I’m comparing the cocktails I ordered and the lychee vodka is a whole world better than the lime vodka. It’s the balanced, fruity sweetness that seem to lick the taste clean without necessarily killing the alcohol. The waitresses who take the orders are wearing skirts that make their assess look shapely as 747 airplanes. The service water washed its hands with cucumber. The music’s very lounge-y, and it matches the cosmopolitan feel that the all-over pink and purple of this place is attempting.

Since we never go out dancing, and D. couldn’t drink, we explore different entertainments. Mommy turns the chopsticks-wrapper into an armband. Origami! And we had a few laughs.

Obviously, nobody reads me because I write for myself. And now, I write for you too, my child. Someday, you will understand, and maybe even appreciate.

After the meal, mommy decides to check out a nice maternity shop around Greenbelt 5. We are not very wealthy. Actually, we are not wealthy at all, but we want to give you the best we can afford.

While Mommy shops, Daddy stays on for another vodka cocktail while reading and writing. “Naked Lunch” by William Borroughs whizzes me away as I glue my eyes on the sick output that is the glorious work of Uncle Bill as a junky. It’s like reading through someone’s vomit, hysteria and delirium which complements the alcohol perfectly. In reading Naked Lunch, and seeing in that frozen moment, what’s at the end of every fork, I understand why some things are written so you never have to go through them yourself.

Like a lot of beat-generation literature, it's an adventurous expansion of experience, the "explosion of consciousness" and to put it in Burroughs' words, the "unlocking of the word hoard." It's going through that unexplored territory, and nearly writing everything as-is, rendering the metaphors and philosophical concepts pure.

Again, in Burroughs' words:

"Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To Book... Black insect lusts open into vast other-planet landscapes... Abstract concepts, bare as algebra, narrow down to a black turd or a pair of aging cojones...

How-To extended levels of experience by opening the door at the end of a long hall... Doors that only open in Silence..."

Yes it's like how the editor, Davd Ulin, describes this read as "T.S. Eliot on heroin."

I barely would have understood any of it (if I did at all), if not for the afterword, editors’ notes, annexes and introductions that made up half this edition.

Between sips of vodka and these words swimming through my eyes I wandered in a dream logic.

But wow, in the sense that I’m doing my favorite things: reading, writing, dating D., this really is a dream.

Three or four rounds, I’m not even sure. There are no windows but I know its high noon and I’m slightly- drunk-silly now.

I look around. The place is no longer nearly-empty since and some brunch/lunch-going guests have settled on the tables. Across ours, there are four girlfriends on Saturday brunch. I manage to observe them discreetly. They’re in fashionable clothes from a summer collection: beautiful fabric, nice cuts, prints, and colors that make the complicated seem simple. Or perhaps it’s really just skimpy clothing or my slightly-drunk-silliness that makes me imagine they’re the Sex and the City bunch.

In my all-too-vivid-mind, I imagine that they’re talking about me. With hushed gasps of breath they’re saying “What a handsome man with a pa-intellectual effect writing in his little Moleskine notebook.” Now here comes the part of the movie when they all stare at me, the Sex-and-the-City bunch eyeing the hunk, only to see my beautiful, pregnant wife kiss me when she arrives. And they go on talking about why they aren’t married.

Daddy will sober up by the time we do the groceries at the Landmark across Greenbelt 5. (And maybe drink some more later tonight).

The Disenchanting El Niño Dry Spell Read

In this summer heat, in this hypnotic heat that clouds your eyes with a white blaze, I decided to fight fire with fire. I read Butch Dalisay’s Killing Time in a Warm Place. I’ve read a lot his work and what he’s edited but I missed this one. I even wrote about his work, and I’d like to think he has a profound, positive influence on me. To an extent, we’re starting to pass this on, as I read a few passages aloud to the little one in D.’s womb.

D. got this sale copy in of the many book fairs where we went in frenzied shopping. I couldn't recall why I didn't read this before. Thinking about it now, it's probably because I had a not-another-book-about-martial-law phase.

But now. Now was the time to read it in this heat.

It was written in the familiar, absorbing language that spoke of the First Quarter Storm in the 1970s. It beautifully struck out the elements of our national and historical consciousness: family trips to Baguio, ginataan meriendas, J&B whiskey, Oxford shoes, mami, American Imperialism, the Metrocom, Cubao, matriarchy and so on. More importantly, it didn’t glamorize the First Quarter Storm as though it was all about heroism against a dictator. From that act of precise incision into our consciousness with a degree of truthfulness, came a novel that represented reality. And this reality thoughtfully surprises you with all-consuming twists.

It was too real, to an effect, that it disappointed me. It disappointed me because it was simply cowardice and compromise that  made it honest and eloquent.

In being conducive to thought and reaction, this becomes a good book and Butch Dalisay becomes an effective author.

Right now I am committing a sin in my failure to separate the persona from the author. I no longer wish to read anything about this compromise and willingness to be subjugated from an author who abandoned one set of principles for another and excused himself by writing about it eloquently. And he might have taught the same thing to many others. Like myself, I thought of him as a sell-out.  And I'm obviously wrong, because I'm merely making excuses for myself.

I am simply reducing my reading to this context I am currently caved in. I am growing up and easing in, exchanging one principle for another or for a few comforts. In this read I am objectifying myself, and I am dissatisfied with the reality it represents.

Pretty soon I will rethink my perspectives and change my mind. Maybe even as soon as the heat simmering us now, cools down my incoherence.

21k Devirginization

I prefer running on my own, but it's also a must to run organized races once in a while to measure up. The best chip-based time in an organized race I registered is 54 minutes on a 10k, which I thought was not too bad for someone who already pops a strong blood pressure maintenance pill once-a-day. On the Nike Plus gadget I use, the best times are as follows:


I thought it was time to train for and run a 21k.

Yesterday’s race was the organized one I ran with water stations at every kilometer-mark, sponges, and a refreshing Makati Central Business District route. As some reviews put it, this finish line had a nice "Singapore-y" or "Orchard Road-ey" feel. Unlike other recent races, there were none of those Brazilian models handing water at the stations. No beer too. But ultimately and most importantly, there's D. waiting for me at the finish line.

The precise moment my endorphins begin to gather and kick in began at 5.19 a.m. in Makati Avenue. It’s the countdown to gun start at the 21k coral. The adrenaline of more serious runners forms up and it seeps into you like a movement in a Jungian collective consciousness. An electric jolt surges through my veins and I look up to the SGV building and the Ayala Triangle. I launch the first song, close my eyes for a second, let out a smile, and set myself sailing.

Runs like these you see nearly all types of runners/people pass and fly past you: Kenyan elite runners, someone who looks like your Dad, your Mom, your Tita, your Lolo, Biggest Loser candidates, Fernando Zobel de Ayala, yuppies, hipsters, maybe even your kindergarten teacher. While the banners show that this is for the benefit of Habitat For Humanity, most of this is really for personal gain.

The first few kilometres were too fast for my standards. I peeked at the sports band and I was running at a 4'01 per kilometer pace. I wouldn’t have enough steam later on, I know, but I was quite thrilled just by looking at the packed bunch of runners making their way uphill (still sprinting) at the Greenbelt parking ramps.

I didn’t plan on hydrating until the 9k mark, but my first among many sips of the sponsored sports drink came in at the 4th kilometer.

The route's heartbreak hill was the Kalayaan (EDSA-Buendia) flyover. At one point, I never wanted to cross this bridge again. I said fuck it when I thought coming back here en route to the finish line. This was easier back in last year’s 10k run. Of course running’s not all metaphorical and dramatic. Like certain abominable or regretful portions of life, you don’t want to go through it again. Running is a Nietzschean test of strength, it’s a recurrence.

I was still running at a decent-enough pace (5'30 to 5'45) all throughout the 10k mark. The halfway point was at Heritage Park. For a while I paused the iPod to listen to my own huffing and puffing, the faint footfalls of others runners, and the souls humming us on. I managed another smile.

At 11k, cramps were settling at the back of my shins and the muscle groups around my gluteus maximus is acting up on me. Training pays off and I manage to run through this sort of pain. I soldier on around Fort Bonifacio.

On the way back, I did the most shameful of things in running and walked for maybe 30 seconds to a minute at the 16k mark. I was also disheartened that the sports band already read more than 17k. But I was certain, I can break through these walls and finish off.

Running on short strides now, I made my way to the finish line. The street was long and quiet until I heard D., calling me out, “Finish Strong!”

I’m happy with my inexcusable mediocre finish. 2 hours 9 minutes chip time. Just 9 minutes short of target, and infinitely behind the elite. Runners using Garmin counted more than 22k in this pleasant-yet-punishing route and my trusty and relatively cheap Nike Plus says I made 21k sub-2 hours. Nonetheless, the endorphins I secreted were countless and priceless. And this makes me more determined to run another day with an official sub-2 hour 21k finish.

Running is my metaphor made physical. What lures me most to running is how the literature surrounding it relates so naturally to my own perceptions of life. “Run at your own pace and make peace with the pace of others.” Now I didn’t just say it, I felt on my own two feet, and lived it off my own steam.

Chemically, it might be the release of endorphins, but you do get your all-natural and mystical high. What I really imagine when I run is that the last hour of my life is flashing past me if I had the strength to live it. I feel that to the bone, the piercing pain that surprises your joints and ligaments, to the failures that eventually prove themselves conquerable, to the brief triumph and the eventual sense of accomplishment. In that hour, there is a lot of thoughtlessness you lose yourself to, along with celebrating and meditating with the music accompanying you.

For the first time, in a rather good race, my life just went by in a 21k run.

Kicking and Somersaulting

Today, we knew you were going to be a man someday.

At 24 weeks and 1 day in your mother’s womb, we saw you kicking and somersaulting through a sonogram. It was a full congenital scan and your body, your eyes, your liver, your heart, lungs were in tact. You are healthy. Early on you’ve already made us happy with the magic of this discovery.

You are the new marvel of this universe. How we marvelled.

Home to you now.

I love you with a love that is certain. I love you with a love that knows no bounds. You are my giver of meaning. You are my truth and you are my beauty. I devote myself to you entirely. WIth you, life is a blissful trip. And I am home to you now.

J. to D. 2.22.2009. The Transfiguration Chapel, Caleruega.

When We Got a Kick Out Of This New Dimension

Newfangled things make such fools of us, sometimes.

It’s the year 2010 and as always, technology is growing quicker than we can adapt to it. Even lonelier, it becomes obsolete faster than we can even cherish it. I’m still actively using my 512MB iPod shuffle, but I was also compelled to get a 20GB iPod Photo. Later on, D. and I got a fourth gen 16GB iPod Nano Video. Less than a year from now, we’re going to laugh at this laptop’s processing or the browsing speed of Intel’s Core 2 Duo. For some reason, it tenderly invites me to just use an Underwood Typewriter, or just push an ageless fountain pen.

Newfangled things make such fools of us, sometimes. It has an effect of making us feel unprepared for the future. I often think about just sticking to what’s familiar and workable.

In 2009, I heard somewhere that the top 6 movies made were in 3D, or had portions in 3D. D. and I like films a lot and we watch around three DVDs a week, with 2 or 3 seasons of a good TV series on DVD per month. But we’ve never seen a 3D film before. We felt like the last couple on earth to have not seen a 3D film in the year 2010.

I must have run a couple hundred km’s worth of 5 or 10ks around the Imax Theater but I’ve never really wanted to be inside.

One Saturday evening in January 2010 (which for someone born in the 1980’s would sound futuristic enough), I and my four-month pregnant wife headed out to see a film in full 3D. When we were kids, movie tickets cost a glorious 20 bucks. The tickets in Imax are worth 400 each, which got for when I got for us in the morning. She was in a maternity dress and a gray sweater, and I had a new black jacket on that fit nicely. I felt I was looking like how I imagined myself in the future, with a beautiful woman who carried our child in her womb.

We put the 3D glasses on and watched our first full 3D film, James Cameron’s Avatar. Fantastically enough, this one was an anti-technology film set in the future, about these tall, blue, nature-loving beings with tails and pointed ears that thrived in the forests of another planet. Unlike earth, their planet wasn’t polluted by so-called technology, greed and delusions of progress. They lived this organic and sustainable lifestyle until a corporation from earth came to drain out their minerals and resources, blasting out their sacred trees with missiles. All for profit. With the powers of nature led by a big, red bird, piloted by a half-human with a gun, the humans are defeated.

We were wowed. 3D, indeed, added a new dimension to films. With the high-frequency surround sounds being just a given, every shot literally had depth and a unique vibrancy that’s almost tangible. When you look back, everybody stares in awe through oversized 3D glasses. This movie was three hours long and the entire time felt like one of the technology-edgy rides in Enchanted Kingdom.

It must have been something. It must have been the blaring surround sounds, the mystifying wideness of the Imax screen, the magic of this story, our fascination, the shape of mouths turning circularly into a wow, or the hope of having goodness in this universe. Something in there made D. feel for the first time, our baby’s kick.

With the 11pm cold January evening wind sliced by a jacket, sweater, and our bodies held together tightly, we walked back to the parking lot. Our faces still marked by those 3D spectacles, she was telling me how that kick felt.

This is our future, I thought. And we’re ready for it.

The Chips Connoisseur

I remember my first memory of purchased joy, the one that actually involved me transacting money. Before my father leaves for the office, the four or five-year-old me would stand by the door and ask him for exactly one peso. Fresh out of the pockets of his slacks, the prized coin would be in a kid’s hands braving the perils of crossing their street to buy a bag of Oishi prawn crackers.

I would empty its clear plastic down to its last grain of monosodium glutamate.

I’ve been eating chips ever since. Almost predictably, with the chips and the unhealthy food (along with stress, and therefore: alcohol, cigarettes), I got a portion of my inheritance early in my 20s - the high blood pressure that runs in the family. The pharmaceutical companies steal from me every day through my maintenance medication. In my late twenties I managed my diet better and took into running as a metaphor for life. I stopped being an all-too-lonely lump of fat, and maintained a body mass index that’s right on the spot.

I gave up on eating a lot of the sumptuous delights of the cholesterol factory. I substituted most of my carbohydrates like rice with wheat bread, even if most people in Asia eat about 2 cups of rice a day. I even learned to read nutrition information in food labels. But even if a small bag of chips contain 20% of the saturated fat daily allowance, I could never give it up entirely. So nowadays, if I close my eyes to my self-imposed diet consciousness and eat chips – it has to be fucking good. In search of the good ones (but not never the most expensive), I’ve proclaimed myself the Chips Connoisseur.

Since D. and I got married, our groceries include a huge bag of Cheeto’s Jalapeno, Gourmet’s Nori flavoured chips, Kimchi Chips, Seat Salt Chips, Kettle’s Cheddar Cheese, Kettle’s Smoky Barbeque. We feast on them while watching DVDs. And there’s my daily needs: the chips to match my healthy sandwiches. For those, I go for the classics: Rin Bee, V-Cut and Nova.

Recently, one of the most delicious (for the unbelievably cheap price tag of 25 pesos) yet most elusive brand of all is the locally made Marty’s Old Fashioned Vegetarian Chicharon. It claims to be “guilt-free” and on the healthy side but it didn’t need to be and quite naturally, never will be. What a hilarious claim. But like most things delicious, everyone who’s had it wants it again. It’s always out-of-stock and its unavailability in major grocery stores gives it a flair of rarity. Parallel to wines, it’s the rare vintage.

Well, that’s according to me, the Chips Connoisseur.

One sunny January day after his shift on his alternate job in a call center, he goes out. The Chips Connoisseur was out to pay the Meralco (electric) bill in a BDO (bank) near Paco (wet market). Near the bank was a news stand. With the pleasure that comes in discovering a knowledge that’s previously uncertain, the Chips Connoisseur thought he saw the familiar blue wrapper of Marty’s Old Fashioned Vegetarian Chicharon. He looked for the vendor. The vendor was on old lady sitting in a green plastic chair. The old lady was asleep, her sagging chin resting on a wrinkly wrist. She’s too old to be still working, he thought. He didn’t want to wake her up but he can’t resist the chips. He wakes her up politely and asks, pointing to the chips, asks, “Magkano po dito?”

“Twenty.” The old lady says, half-yawning.

The Chips Connoisseur knew that price didn’t sound right. It was wrong to steal this rare find, especially from old ladies powerless old ladies who do not understand that those chips were vintage.

He paid the right price – what it was really worth (25 pesos), and all the coins he had left. “Keep the change.” So they say.

Chips Connoisseur, big time.

Never-Accomplished Writing

It was first time I caught a whiff of her. She smelled like a new book. You pick up a new book from the fancy store shelf, the crisp and the newly minted yellow leaves summoning you. Untouched and tempting. You press the edge of the bound pages against your nostrils. Your thumb slowly flares the pages against your nose, as though to squeeze the smell out.

It smelled like a spirit that my spirit longed to be acquainted.

Leftover Magic Dust in my Coffee

We return to be smothered by the exhaustion of normal life.

In one of the afternoons during this holiday break, I uncovered a secret. Maybe I’m exaggerating again, as it’s just a simple recipe. Now I’m going to sound like a cretin. I poured a strong blend of drip coffee over finely powdered chocolate milk along with a packet of a natural zero-calorie sweetener and the result was Cafe Mocha.

The simplicity made it magical. I want to say, it’s not like chasing my own tail as I know for certain that it’s magic. But maybe it was just the holidays – which are over now. Tomorrow, life reverts to normal. Once again, we’ve got less time to see family and friends. We’re done with being drunk fizzy with elation. We return to be smothered by the exhaustion of normal life.

This afternoon and this evening were the final exceptions. After a short morning run, house chores, a warm bath, and a delightful lunch prepared by D., we saw another wonderful-enough Woody Allen.

...Whatever love you can get and give, whatever happiness you can filch or provide, every temporary measure of grace, whatever works.


Following the film, I made coffee and put the magic dust to spend the afternoon reading these delicious, bite-size stories from Italo Calvino in Numbers in the Dark, along with a back issue of Harper’s. The reads were fantastic and I feel enriched. Imagine this quote from Calvino, for example:

...I still live in a castle of meanings, not things.

In a Celebration of H.’s, in one of those hardcore drunken conversations when you spoke of what agitated your life, I told my good friend M., “I realized I don’t want to get rich.” Maybe that’s what I meant, I didn’t want to amass things. I yearned for meaning. I know now, I wouldn't be rich, but be like living like a king in a castle.

When evening came today, we heard mass and had a filling dinner at a tea house near the church. Ceremoniously, they stirred chilli in the soy sauce. Life felt like a Murakami novel. We retreat home for her to rest, and me to write.

We wish more of the magic dust. And all we have to do is think of next Christmas, when we’re going to be a family of our own. J, D, and the little one.